Miami filmmakers, including two from Coconut Grove, are benefitting from the film festival’s efforts to showcase local talent. The 2026 festival opens next week.
With its abundant sunshine and lush vegetation, Miami sets an entrancing stage for local filmmakers to showcase some of the city’s rich diasporic tales, local legends, and cultural clashes.
This year, the Miami Film Festival will honor those homegrown efforts by screening a record number of local films during the 11-day event, starting next Thursday.
“We’re always looking for ways to give back to the local filmmaking community,” says James Woolley, the festival’s executive director.
The festival has turned that promise into practice with three programs aimed at filmmakers who have connections to South Florida:
- The Miami Film Fund, which will award $15,000 in grants to filmmakers in three categories this spring.
- The Made in MIA awards program with $20,000 in prize money for local films that are screened during this year’s festival, and
- The Louies, an initiative for documentary works-in-progress that’s bearing fruit after making its first grants in 2025. Filmmakers who win a Louie award are invited to screen their completed films at the festival.
This year’s festival includes two short documentaries that won Louie awards of $10,000 each in January 2025 – Jayme Kaye Gershen’s “The Floor Remembers” about a beloved Kendall skating rink, and Symone Titania Major’s “Under the Mango Tree,” a lyrical film about a Goulds resident who is deeply attached to his family’s mango tree.
A third grant winner from 2025 – “Dual Citizen,” a feature-length documentary by Rachelle Salnave – will screen on Tuesday, April 14 at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex.
In the film, Salnave tells a personal story about the road she traveled to reclaim her Haitian citizenship long after her father had renounced his own.
“It’s a sweet but also funny-at-times examination of a family and what citizenship means,” Woolley said. “It has so much to say about Miami, and we’re so proud we were able to support this film.”
Like her two fellow filmmakers, Salnave won a $10,000 award in January 2025 to finish her documentary. The festival made six awards that first year totaling $100,000.
Another six filmmakers won awards in January this year. The awards are sponsored by the Lynn & Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation.
“Honestly, in my two decades of making films, The Louie’s is one of the smartest and most useful grants that have been awarded to me,” says Salnave, who has a long history working with the festival.
To gather footage for “Dual Citizen,” Salnave tapped into the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Florida Moving Image Archives at Miami Dade College.
Filmmakers who win a Louie are granted access to the archives, which opened in 1984 to house film and video that documents Florida’s history.
“As a documentary filmmaker who has primarily documented Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora, the Wolfson Archives have been golden for my research and creativity,” Salnave said.
Another filmmaker who won a Louie award in 2025 – Coconut Grove resident Margaret Cardillo – is close to finishing her feature-length documentary, “Jane Chastain: The Untold Story of the Nation’s First Female Sportscaster.”
A University of Miami screenwriting professor and children’s book author, Cardillo has worked with the festival in the past as a viewer, juror, and filmmaker.
Cardillo’s documentary tells the story of Chastain’s rise to prominence at Miami’s first TV station, WTVJ, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and explores why Miami, in particular, was the market that allowed the first female sportscaster to break into national broadcasting.
“This film is homegrown. All of my support so far has been from this community,” Cardillo says. The $50,000 Louie award she won allowed her to hire an editor and work with an archival producer.
“Miami Magic” directed by Coconut Grove resident Vicky Collado is another short film that will screen this year, as part of the festival’s Made in MIA programming.
The screenplay, which was written by Collado’s business partner Vanessa Garcia and friend Natalie Birriel, tells the story of a failed 38-year-old comedy writer who returns to Miami from New York and finds herself performing at a child’s birthday party, only to run into her high school arch nemesis and crush.
“It’s a comedy about shame and the premise of the film is, when you think it’s all over, it’s only just beginning,” Collado says.
This is her first time showing at the festival.
“It’s truly special. It’s been a wild ride,” she says.
“Miami Magic” is the product of networking and resource building. It was filmed in Collado’s backyard and Birriel’s grandmother, in her nineties, is in the film.
“It was a very Miami process [to make],” Collado says of the scrappy nature of the film, calling it homegrown. “So, the only place that it makes sense that it premieres is at the Miami Film Festival. We get to watch it with our family and friends who we grew up with and who have watched us dream,” she says.
The film will shine, Collado shares, for “the community it was truly made for.”
The Miami Film Festival takes place from April 9 to 19 at various locations across the city. Follow this link for a complete schedule and tickets.
