Announcing the 2025 Film Slate!

The U.S. Department of State’s American Film Showcase (AFS) is proud to announce its 2025 film slate. This lineup of award-winning, contemporary American documentaries will be featured in a year-round screening program organized by U.S. Embassies in over 60 countries.

AFS offers foreign audiences access to top American documentaries.  U.S. Embassies are able to showcase the American experience by organizing film screenings for local audiences globally, from university students, to filmmakers, to community organizers.

“AFS’s screening program is a global film festival offering international audiences a nuanced view of American life and creating space for cross-cultural dialogue,” said Rachel Gandin Mark, AFS Program Director. “We are incredibly proud of this year’s wide-ranging collection of American films and can’t wait to share these stories with new audiences.”

“The stories explored in this year’s collection of 43 films reflect the diversity of the American experience from St. Lawrence Island in Alaska to the Florida Everglades,” said Ben Chance, AFS Head of Film. “The AFS slate features portraits of notable Americans such as Grammy-award winning musician Jon Batiste, forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni, and Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. The AFS slate takes viewers on a journey into the world of high school mariachi in South Texas, the efforts to enshrine press freedom  in Muscogee Nation, Oklahoma, and onto the pitch with Angel City FC, the first professional women’s soccer team in Los Angeles.”

This year’s lineup features the 2024 Academy Award winning documentary short The Last Repair Shop, Oscar nominees Audible and The Barber of Little Rock, and other critically acclaimed documentaries.

“Independent documentary filmmakers dream of reaching a global audience,” said Ben Proudfoot, Oscar award-winning director of The Last Repair Shop. “We can tell you first hand there is nothing more exciting than seeing our films spark lively conversations in countries like Yemen, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Colombia. We are so grateful to American Film Showcase and the U.S. State Department and are deeply honored to be joining this incredible cadre of documentary storytellers.”

Through its collaboration with top American distributors, including Amazon, L.A Times Short Docs, Magnolia Pictures, Netflix, The New Yorker, PBS, The Walt Disney Company, and Warner Bros. Discovery, along with independent filmmakers, global audiences can view films they would not have access to otherwise via U.S. Embassy screenings.

Since 2012, AFS has included more than five hundred U.S. documentaries in its slate and has produced over 5,000 screenings in 135 countries, reaching more than half a million people. U.S. Embassies often invite American filmmakers to lead Q&A discussions with local audiences at overseas screenings of their films.

AFS is the State Department’s flagship international film and TV public diplomacy program, connecting people through the power of visual storytelling. AFS offers global audiences’ insights into American society through film and TV content; supports international filmmakers through cultural exchanges and mentorships; and builds cross-cultural networks of creative professionals.

AFS is a film diplomacy initiative of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and is implemented and produced by the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.  Film diplomacy is part of the United States’ diplomatic efforts to promote peace and democracy worldwide and supports broader U.S. efforts to achieve key foreign policy goals by expanding access to education, economic equity – including in the creative economy, and societal opportunity and inclusion.