The 23rd-annual Global Peace Film Festival this year expects to offer even more entertainment and inspiration for film fans, peace activists and diversity advocates.
Global Peace 360, which organizes the festival, will also present an adjacent event, UrbanFest 360, over the weekend of September 20 and 21. “It’s a mini film festival inside our film festival,” says CEO David Wheeler—who since taking the helm of the festival in 2024 has rebranded the organization as Global Peace 360—to screen films year-round and be more inclusive. “We wanted to branch out, culturally speaking.”
In celebrating urban culture, UrbanFest360 will screen 55 films at the AFRO TV studio on International Drive. These will include short and feature-length films, student projects, documentaries and even music videos.
Headliners include For Kicks, a documentary about Eugene Thomas, a Chicago security guard who became a Black martial arts film star in Asia, and Theatre While Black: The Robey Theatre Company, the theater established by Danny Glover and Ben Guillory to explore the Black experience.
The annual Global Peace Film Festival itself will open with the feature film Lilly, a docudrama about Lilly Ledbetter, the Alabama factory worker whose fight for equal pay for equal work led to a Supreme Court case and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. The film, starring Patricia Clarkson, will be screened at 6 p.m. September 16 at the Enzian in Maitland.
The festival—as always wrapped around International Day of Peace on September 21—will show 20 other films, all documentaries, over five days at venues that include the Winter Park Library and Rollins College.
Highlights of that schedule include two documentaries from director Barbara Kopple: Gumbo Coalition, about Marc Morial and Janet Murguia, two urban leaders fighting racism, and her Harlan County USA, the Academy-Award winning account of a 1974 mine-workers strike in Kentucky.
