Global Peace Film Festival 2026

The paths to Peace

Global Peace FF spreads throughout Orlando

Exclusive to MeierMovies, September 13, 2026

Once confined to Winter Park and Maitland, the Global Peace Film Festival, for the third time, is spreading its cinematic wings to the I-Drive tourist area, screening an estimated 62 films in person and another 32 online.

The traditional part of the fest will take place September 15-19 and screen 19 movies (18 features and one short) in four venues in the northern part of the Orlando metro area: Enzian Theater, Regal Winter Park Village, Bush Auditorium at Rollins College and Winter Park Library (which will host a free filmmaker discussion with Oscar-winning director Marshall Curry at 1 p.m. on September 17). The festival will then shift online for September 20-27 when its Free for All Shorts program (featuring 32 films under 50 minutes in length) will live up to its name by costing nothing and being easily accessible to all visitors to the fest’s website.

A Break in the Rain will open the festival at Enzian Theater on September 15.

The festival will conclude on September 26-27 at Afro TV Studios on International Drive with an estimated 43 more movies. Twenty-three of those (a mix of shorts, “mediums” and features) will be part of the regular program while six shorts will represent the Bridging Worlds program and an estimated 14 will be part of FusionFest’s MYgration film contest, which invited 14 filmmaking teams to create a short documentary in roughly one week.

All three parts of the festival are, as usual, documentary-heavy, with many films championing a particular issue or social message. But the I-Drive films are more Florida-centric than those screening in Winter Park and Maitland, which remain global-focused.

Festival founder and director Nina Streich handed the CEO reins of Global Peace 360 (the festival’s parent company, which holds film events throughout the year) to David Wheeler about four years ago. However, she seems as passionate as ever about the 24-year-old festival, staying intimately involved in the selection process along with festival programmer and artistic director Kelly DeVine, who has worked for the fest since 2006.

“I’m a film lover. I love documentaries,” Streich told me. “My motivation for keeping it going in the very early years was to inspire people to do things in their community [and] to make the world a better place [and] to engage and get civically involved, civically active. And that has only become more important as we’ve gotten so polarized in this country.”

Streich and I discussed the differences between the two main sections of the festival.

“Kelly [DeVine] and I call the September 15-19 the ‘O.G. Festival,’ and the one at Afro TV: The actual title of the festival is Global Peace 360 on International Drive,” Streich says. “Global Peace Film Festival for a long time has been an Orange County Cultural Tourism grantee, and one of the things about showing films on I-Drive is we’re taking some of our programming to basically the heart of the tourist area.”

Streich, whom I first interviewed 13 years ago, reminded me she is still a resident of New York City who travels to Orlando each year for the festival, and we again discussed the circumstances that landed the festival in Orlando instead of her hometown. (She was hired to do the job here.) Long story short, the Big Apple’s loss has been the City Beautiful’s gain.

“It’s made more of a difference here than it would ever have made in New York,” Streich says.

Part of the “difference” to which Streich refers is the festival’s mission.

“The difference between our festival and most other festivals is [with most] festivals, people are excited when the lights go down and the film is about to start. With us, we want people to be equally or even more inspired when the lights come back up [and] people in the audience are like, ‘What can I do about this?’ That’s our sweet spot.”

For more information about the festival and to purchase tickets, visit PeaceFilmFest2026.eventive.org or click the links above for each part of the fest. A pass to all films costs $125 while a pass to all but the opening-night film at Enzian Theater is $100. A single ticket to most films costs $10.

For all my past coverage of the festival, go here.

Film Ratings

Features

The Energy that Heals (2026) – 1 ¾ stars
The Extraordinary Caterpillar Hybrid (2026) – 2 stars
The New Yorker at 100 (2025) – 3 ¼ stars
Street Fight (2005) – 3 ¾ stars
A Break in the Rain (2026) – 1 ½ stars
The Call ½FL (2026) – 1 star

Shorts

Moment of Silence AI (2025) – 1 star
Healing the Heart Through Art ½FL (2025) – 1 star
At the Mercy of Heaven FL (2026) – 4 stars
Neighbors (2026) – 1 star
Mr. Happy (2026) – 1 star
Dementia Has a PR Problem (2026) – 2 stars
E Is for Empathy (2026) – 3 stars
Bold Gold (2026) – 2 stars
Cardboard Heart FL (2025) – 2 stars
A Night at the Garden Hybrid (2017) – 3 stars

Nina Streich, the festival’s founder and director, addresses the audience at Enzian Theater on opening night while Global Peace 360 CEO David Wheeler looks on.

Oscar-winning director Marshall Curry answers audience questions following a screening of his 2005 political documentary, Street Fight, at Bush Auditorium at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, on September 16. Curry has two other films in the festival: his Oscar-nominated short, A Night at the Garden, from 2017, and The New Yorker at 100, from 2025. I recommend all three.