About InLight
Launched in 2015, the InLight Human Rights Documentary Film Festival has worked to serve the communities in Bloomington and Indiana University through the curation and exhibition of innovative contemporary documentaries focused on human rights issues. InLight prides itself on curating films that are aesthetically beautiful and conceptually rigorous, and we make every effort to have representatives of each film in attendance. Held every two years, the festival endeavors to generate meaningful questions and conversations among artists and spectators, working through the intertwining of social realities and art.
Marking its seventh edition, the 2026 iteration will feature eight documentary screenings, an art installation, as well as panels, round tables, and social events across various local venues and university partners. With an intentional focus on upholding the festival’s tradition of showcasing diverse voices from across the globe, the 2026 program addresses themes central to society and culture at the present moment, including class disparity, climate change, migration, and collective resistance. By showcasing films set in The United States, Afghanistan, Kenya, Great Britain, Siberia, Lebanon, and even the bottom of the ocean, InLight 2026 seeks to engage Bloomington with local realities across the globe, recognizing the resonances and dissonances they have with each other and with Indiana itself, hoping to illuminate our similarities and engage with the differences.
Sub-Themes
Knowledge in Motion
The first sub-theme focuses on the relationship between ever-morphing power and knowledge, inquiring into the subjective nature of why knowledge is produced, circulated, and for whom it serves, and importantly, how these facets of knowledge creation shift depending on contexts. We will showcase three films for this subtheme: Shadow Scholars (2025), directed by Eloïse King, Writing Hawa (2025) directed by Najiba Noori, and Natchez (2025), directed by Suzannah Herbert. The films in this program exhibit various tensions between understanding and oppression, with Shadow Scholars touching on postcolonial exploitation of knowledge production, Natchez asking who controls exhibition of memory, and Writing Hawa examining education as resistance.
Class Disparity and Justice
This program focuses on the relationship between economic oppression and control in class contexts. Unpacking how systemic capitalism manufactures everyday hardship and exponential precarity in the lives of the working class, this subtheme explores conflicts between the most powerful with the most vulnerable, showing examples of mutual aid within communities working for change. We will screen: Seeds (2025) directed by Brittany Shyne, which looks at class, race, and access to subsidies with farmers in Georgia, and Slumlord Millionaire (2025) directed by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez, which shows the tensions between renters and the real estate industry in post-gentrified New York City.
Climate Change
In the third part and final part of our program, we will be focusing on the effects of climate change, both small and large. This program features Black Snow (2024) directed by Alina Simone, Below the Clouds (2025) directed by Gianfranco Rossi, and How Deep is Your Love (2025) directed by Eleanor Mortimer. This program illuminates the urgent environmental crises driven by human industry and exploration, with Black Snow exposing the devastating human and ecological toll of coal mining in Siberia, and How Deep is Your Love delving into the fragile, enigmatic ecosystems of the deep sea threatened by impending mining operations.