Unorthodocs Shorts 2026

Unorthodocs Shorts 2026 comes to the Wexner Center for the Arts on Thursday, October 22, at 4:30 PM. It's a program of documentary shorts, and this year it's part of the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View. The whole thing runs about 82 minutes, so you're in and out in a little over an hour and a half.

To get where this fits, it helps to know what Unorthodocs is. It's the Wexner Center's annual festival celebrating creative nonfiction filmmaking, now in its 10th year. The programming mixes topics and forms—animation and live performance both make an appearance—and it brings the people featured in the documentaries into the theater. The festival also highlights the precarious state of documentary distribution: last year, only two of the twelve essential films screened at Unorthodocs received even a modest national release. That positions the festival as one of the few ways to connect audiences with this kind of urgent, innovative work and the filmmakers behind it.

One of the films on the bill is First They Came for My College (Patrick Bresnan, 2026). The shorts program as a whole runs about 82 minutes, and since it's part of the larger Unorthodocs festival, it sits alongside the other nonfiction work the center is showcasing this season.

The screening is at the Film/Video Theater inside the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. It's free for all audiences with a ticket, so you'll want to grab yours ahead of time. It starts at 4:30 PM on Thursday, October 22.