Documentary Screening Series

2025-2026 Schedule

Presented by Mid's Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Action (IDEA) Committee. All documentary screenings are free, and everyone is welcome to attend.

Only I Can Hear
- In the American Midwest, three hearing teenagers come of age in the vibrant deaf community. With feet in two worlds, yet fully at home in neither, they seek identity through their shared experience as CODA: Children of Deaf Adults.

Gather
- Gather is an intimate portrait of the growing movement amongst Native Americans to reclaim their spiritual, political, and cultural identities through food sovereignty, while battling the trauma of centuries of genocide. Gather follows Nephi Craig, a chef from the White Mountain Apache Nation (Arizona), opening an indigenous café as a nutritional recovery clinic; Elsie Dubray, a young scientist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation (South Dakota), conducting landmark studies on bison; and the Ancestral Guard, a group of environmental activists from the Yurok Nation (Northern California), trying to save the Klamath river.

Resurface
- After years of nightmares, depression, and seizures, Iraq war veteran Bobby Lane could see no way out of his trauma other than suicide. Then he met Van Curaza, a former big wave surfer who had since founded Operation Surf and dedicated his life to helping veterans find solace in surfing. Backed by a growing body of research illustrating the healing power of the ocean on the mind and body, organizations such as Operation Surf and the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation are using surfing to help veterans cope with physical and mental trauma. The Netflix original documentary short, Resurface, directed by Joshua Izenberg (Slomo) and Wynn Padula, tells the story of Bobby and other veterans who have experienced the powerful and prescriptive effects of surf on the traumas of war.

Coded Bias
- In her role as an MIT media researcher, Joy Buolamwini realized that many facial recognition systems didn’t recognize her face. Curious, she dug deeper and soon learned that these systems only worked when she wore a white mask and covered her dark skin. This film explores this phenomenon and uncovers how artificial technology affects minorities. There are few legal structures for AI, which flings the door open for human rights violations. If AI can discriminate, it has huge implications for the technology’s use in housing, career opportunities, healthcare, education, credit, and the legal system.

Common Ground
- By fusing journalistic exposé with deeply personal stories from those on the front lines of the sustainable food movement, Common Ground unveils a dark web of money, power, and politics behind our broken food system. As the highly anticipated sequel to Kiss the Ground, the film profiles a hopeful and uplifting movement of white, black, and indigenous farmers who are using alternative, regenerative models of agriculture that could balance the climate, save our health, and stabilize America’s economy – before it’s too late.

Descendant
- Descendants of the enslaved Africans on an illegal ship that arrived in Alabama in 1860 seek justice and healing when the craft’s remains are discovered.

Feminists: What Were They Thinking?
- In 1977, a book of photographs captured an awakening—women shedding the cultural restrictions of their childhoods and embracing their full humanity. Feminists: What Were They Thinking? revisits those photos, those women, and those times—and takes aim at our current culture, revealing all too vividly the urgent need for continued change. The film offers candid and riveting interviews with women such as Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Judy Chicago, and Laurie Anderson, tackling topics ranging from identity, abortion, race, childhood, and motherhood. A Netflix original documentary directed by Johanna Demetrakas.

Audrie & Daisy
- In this heartbreaking documentary, two teens are cruelly cyberbullied after learning that sexual assault crimes against them were caught on camera.

Contact Amy Dykhouse, Director of Career Center & Accommodations, at (989) 317-4613 or adykhouse@midmich.edu.