The New Mexico Documentary Incubator Grants Program (NMDIG) funded 7 early-career New Mexico documentary filmmakers in 2026.  The documentaries they have produced address important and timely issues facing by New Mexican communities today.   The filmmakers hail from across the state and will be available for Q&A after the screening.

Anton Sage:   The longest Wait: New Mexico’s Healthcare Shortage

The longest Wait is an original short documentary produced by Anton Sage Studios LLC and directed and produced by Anton Sage. The film examines the healthcare professional shortage in New Mexico through the lived experiences of those most affected: patients, frontline providers, and community advocates. Rather than focusing solely on statistics, the documentary centers human stories that expose how workforce shortages ripple through families, rural towns, Tribal and border communities, and urban safety-net clinics.

Cesca-Maria Segarra: Pill

Pill is a short-form observational documentary examining the intersection of fentanyl use and housing instability in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Through intimate portraits of individuals living this reality alongside the voices of harm-reduction workers, mutual-aid volunteers, and local creatives, the film shifts the narrative away from criminalization and toward humanity, care, and systemic complexity. Blending vérité footage, environmental soundscapes, and moments of artistic expression, the film asks what it means to remain alive—and visible—in a city grappling with overlapping public health and housing crises.

Joanna Keane Lopez:   A Raven Croaked Like a Witch from a Dead Pine

A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine is a short film that examines the intersections of adobe, land, ranching culture, and military occupation in New Mexico. Footage spans cattle ranches located within and adjacent to White Sands Missile Range and the downwinder communities of Carrizozo, San Antonio, and Tularosa. These landscapes are interwoven with oral histories from the filmmaker’s family—multigenerational ranchers in the Tularosa Basin—alongside archival material and declassified ballistics imagery. Stories of encounters with cougars, wailing ghosts in the night, cadavers found in arroyos, long-lost rifles unearthed from the sand, satanists in the bosque, and the mysterious orbs of light known for generations as La Luz del Llano circulate throughout the film. Together, these narratives reflect what material culture scholars describe as vernacular epistemologies: ways of knowing shaped through embodied labor, environmental memory, and long-term habitation. A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine traces the lived experience of a landscape where ranching, myth, and memory coexist with the ongoing presence of military occupation. The title is drawn from Edward Abbey’s novel, Fire on The Mountain.

kelechi agwuncha:   breath to breath

breath to breath follows Phoenix Savage, a 62-year-old New Mexico based Black queer artist, doula, yogi, and Yoruba/Ifa devotee of Osara, a water deity venerated as a mother figure. Across her life, she moves between ceremony, art-making, and community-based teaching, building practices that respond directly to mothers and women navigating survival.

After returning to New Mexico following over 20 years away, Phoenix founded the Yoga in Prison Project (2023–25) at the Springer Correctional Women’s Facility, drawing on her lived experience of having family members incarcerated and her spiritual practice, which integrates daily ancestor shrine devotion, prayer, and reverence for Osara. In the film, we follow Phoenix as she guides the program, leading participants through a practice that combines trauma-informed yoga, mindfulness, and meditation. Beyond the prison walls, breath to breath follows recently released participants Lyndale Bedah and Allaya “Yaya” Gibbs as they continue their yoga teacher training in Farmington and Albuquerque. Through certification, they bring the practice to their own communities.

Leandra Romero:  The Weight of Water

This 20-minute documentary follows Donovan, a former Navy SEAL who now works as a photojournalist for the Navajo Times, as he reports on the ongoing water crisis across the Navajo Nation, where many families still live without running water. After years of serving overseas, Donovan has returned home to serve in a different way, using his camera to document the realities facing his own community. His work is shaped not only by his military background, but by the personal grief of losing his sister and niece to violence, a loss that deepens his sense of responsibility to witness and protect. Through an intimate, character-driven lens, the film explores water, service, and resilience, asking what it means to be a warrior for your own people.

Makayla Yazzie:  Between Home and College: Navajo Student Stories

This 15–20 minute short documentary follows Navajo college students as they navigate the ups and downs of higher education while maintaining cultural connections. Participants self-record with phones and contribute guided interviews, capturing authentic reflections and daily experiences. The project prioritizes student engagement, ethical storytelling, and creating a platform for dialogue within the Native college student community.

R.J. Torres:  1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Riot - Roger Morris (The Devils Butcher Shop)

This documentary is about the New Mexico State penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2nd, 1980, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thirty-three inmates lost their lives and hundreds were injured. This riot stemmed from the constant neglect by the department of corrections and the government. Conditions were inhumane and the prison was overcrowded. Prisoner Dwight Duran took action against the poor conditions in the penitentiary. Duran would file and found the Duran Consent Decree against the state in 1977. The decree asked for better conditions at the penitentiary. He warned the state that there would be trouble in the future if the conditions were not improved. Duran was ignored, and now here I am, making a documentary about the most gruesome, yet political prison riot in American history. The Duran Consent Decree was not settled until 2020 and some would say that reform never came to the Old Santa Fe Penitentiary. I will tell the full story of this piece of New Mexican history, from before, to during, to after the riot.