FESTIVAL PREMIERE: A still from “Randy Wicker – A Portrait,” DEAI Stellar Award by Nicole Pometti and Rolando Nieves, to be screened at the 45th Anniversary Thomas Edison Film Festival premiere on February 20. (Photo courtesy of Nicole Pometti and Rolando Nieves)
The 45th anniversary season of the Thomas Edison Film Festival (TEFF) will premiere with a pre-event reception and screening followed by a Q&A with filmmakers, presented in collaboration with Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, at the James Stewart Film Theater, 185 Nassau Street. The seven short films to be screened represent animation, documentary, experimental, narrative and screen dance genres. Selections from the Stellar Award-winning films will also be available to view online February 21-28, at tefilmfest.org.
The international juried competition of the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium celebrates all genres and independent filmmakers across the globe. TEFF is an Academy Awards Qualifying Festival and a Canadian Screen Award Qualifying Festival — the only film festival in New Jersey to hold these designations. For 45 years, the festival has been advancing the unique creativity and power of the short film by celebrating stories that shine a light on issues and struggles within contemporary society. The festival was founded in 1981 as the Black Maria Film Festival and originally named for Thomas Edison’s West Orange, New Jersey, film studio dubbed the “Black Maria” because of its resemblance to the black-box police paddy wagons of the same name. Renamed in 2021, the festival’s relationship to Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion camera, the kinetoscope, and his experimentation with short film inspired the festival’s origins.
This is the eighth year the Lewis Center has collaborated with the Consortium to host the annual TEFF premiere. In addition to premiering the season, the Consortium programs other screenings for Princeton audiences and brings festival filmmakers together with Princeton students and faculty.
The festival received a record 950 submissions for the 2026 season from six continents and 83 countries around the world. Following an extensive pre-screening process by experts in the field of film curation, media studies and production, the highly regarded festival jurors, Margaret Parsons, Curator Emerita of Film at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Henry Baker, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and former director of Synapse Video Center, chose 98 films for the 2026 collection and awarded the top prizes. Following the premiere at Princeton, these films will be made available for screenings in the U.S. and abroad.