Mother Tongue Film Festival

Welcome to the Mother Tongue Story Map! This resource is a visual archive of every film shown at the Mother Tongue Film Festival, hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage as part of the Recovering Voices Initiative. From its inception in 2016, to its tenth edition in 2025, the Mother Tongue Film Festival has strived to represent global language, culture, and artistic expression.

Films are grouped by continent and in alphabetical order by Mother Tongue Film Festival year. Scroll from Africa to Oceania, or select specific regions to explore.

Each movie is accompanied by a marker which shows the approximate location of the culture or language represented in the film. For certain films, viewers can watch trailers or full films without leaving the map. We hope you enjoy this resource! 

Mother Tongue's mission is to promote linguistic and cultural diversity by highlighting the work of filmmakers around the world and working to make Indigenous film more accessible. A mother tongue is a person's first language, the language, or languages, that they spoke at home as a child. Our native languages have a personal and emotional link with us as individuals. When a language is threatened or endangered, our emotional connections are heightened. Language is more than just a way for us to express ourselves. It's a lens through which we may comprehend and interpret the world. It provides us with the means to communicate and understand our own experiences.

Language is crucial to the establishment and preservation of our connections as a defining feature of being human. Mother Tongue film is more of a filter to use when watching movies than it is a unique genre. Using the Mother Tongue filter necessitates a critical examination of the role of language in a film. We see language functioning consciously in the Mother Tongue film, underlining themes of rootedness, identification, affiliation, connection, and community. Mother Tongue film is a broad category that has the ability to push us out of our comfort zones and expose us to a variety of viewpoints. By putting language front and center, Mother Tongue films also help to dismantle the idea of monolingualism as the prevalent global norm, highlighting the limitless possibility that exists within multilingual narrative and being.

Mother Tongue film is a method for those of us who reside outside of our motherland to reconnect with our family and culture. It connects us to our land for those of us whose motherland has been taken away. Reflection, representation, and community are all themes of Mother Tongue. Because language is both a ground for and a type of intimacy, these films have left an indelible impression. Welcome to the Mother Tongue tour of the years, an accumulation of the many wonderful films featured from 2016-2025.  Learn more about the definition of a Mother Tongue film. 

Thanks to the contributions of: Paloma Catalán, Amalia Córdova, Jovanna Gonzalez, Elisa Hough, Corinn Olson, Gabriel Silverstein-Rivera, and Josenrique Villarreal.

Please contact   mothertongue@si.edu   with any questions or feedback.

On International Mother Language Day, February 21, 2016 the Smithsonian Institution's Recovering Voices Initiative hosted the first Mother Tongue Film Festival. Recovering Voices is an initiative founded in response to the global crisis of cultural knowledge and language loss. It collaborates with communities and other institutions to address issues of indigenous language and knowledge diversity and sustainability. At the week-long inaugural Mother Tongue Film Festival, nineteen native languages from eight different regions were represented.

The 2017 Mother Tongue Film Festival kicked off on United Nations Mother Language Day, February 21, 2017. Featuring thirty-one languages from twelve regions, the second-annual Mother Tongue Film Festival sought to expand the representation of global languages.  As part of the festival’s expansion, curators included programs that focus on the power of music, including documentaries, music videos, and discussions about global hip-hop. This festival also featured the first Mother Tongue Filmmaker Roundtable, hosted by five experts in film and language.

The 2018 Mother Tongue Film Festival featured the first open call for films, receiving 95 submissions. The final selection of films featured 29 languages from 14 regions, with nearly every film shown showcasing a different mother tongue. The third Mother Tongue Film Festival opened with an intertribal drum-circle and featured more opportunities than ever to engage with directors, including a Women Directors Roundtable ( available online ). Mother Tongue collaborated with the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital to show five Mother Tongue Film Festival shorts on the topic of environmental issues in March of the same year.

"Language diversity is one of humanity’s most remarkable achievements"

The United Nations declared 2019 to be the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and the Mother Tongue Film Festival was honored to be a part of this worldwide endeavor. The festival also supported the first Smithsonian Year of Music by hosting a number of musical performances as part of the film festival, as well as two major standalone events that took place around the country and globally throughout the year. In comparison to previous years, the fourth festival featured 60 films and audiovisual experiences from 22 areas in 66 languages, doubling the number of languages. The festival honored language revival around the world by investigating the relationship between language vitality and personal and communal well-being through a carefully curated collection of films.

Women have always played a key role in the Mother Tongue Film Festival; they are often the first teachers of language, hence “mother tongue”. The 2020 festival sought to highlight female directors, writers, and characters as well as their role in uplighting marginalized voices. The fifth Mother Tongue Film Festival showcased 28 languages from 22 regions, with five of the seven feature films directed by women. Many of the films highlighted issues that women face and their roles in different indigenous societies.

The 2021 Mother Tongue Film Festival saw change, expansion, and opportunity. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the sixth festival shifted to a wholly online experience which lasted three months and centered around the ability of storytelling to heal. The event included a wide range of topics as diverse as the 26 regions and the 39 languages represented. The festival theme alluded to the power of film and digital storytelling to address and repair the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. It also emphasized the importance of listening to Indigenous and Native stories in all of their forms. The robust online programming developed for this year would inspire future digital programming that allows the Mother Tongue Film Festival to be accessible to viewers across the globe.

“Language is inextricably linked to our identity”

I ka wā ma mua, i ka wā ma hope (through the past is the future) is an ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi proverb. It invokes an awareness that our predecessors provide us with a basis for the futures we make and reminds us that our historical perceptions are as fluid as our own present civilizations. The 2022 Mother Tongue Film Festival focused on our ancestors' legacies, whether they are expressed in the words we say, the songs we sing, the land and sea we live on, the records we read, or the audiovisual recordings we view. While remembering the past difficulties, we concentrate on its gifts and lessons in order to help us develop more equitable futures. The seventh Mother Tongue Film Festival featured 43 languages from 17 regions in an entirely virtual program with a strong focus on pacific cultures.

The 2023 Mother Tongue Film Festival saw a return to in-person events after two years of virtual programming. Reflecting on this homecoming, the theme of the eighth festival focused on the return of people and objects to their origins, inviting viewers to contemplate what makes a home and what fuels our strong emotional connection to our homes. This year featured 24 languages from 12 regions with a strong focus on arctic cultures. Through a partnership with Planet World, we screened a selection of short films made by students of the Sakha media school. The festival ran in conjunction with InDigital IV: The Americas, Indigenous Peoples’ Engagement with Digital and Electronic Media, a conference co-organized with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The ninth Mother Tongue Film Festival adopted the theme of finding balance, focusing on stories of creating harmony in our communities and amongst ourselves. The 2024 programming featured 25 languages from 12 regions with themes of embracing cultural traditions while adapting to inevitable changes in culture, identity, and belief. Art and culture were showcased as forms of sustenance and strength, concepts that keep us going in times of instability and hardship. 

In 2025, we celebrated the festival’s tenth year with ten days of free hybrid programming. During the first four days of the festival, we presented newly selected films in-person across venues in Washington DC. We screened 23 films in 23 languages from 17 regions. For the next six days, we hosted an online retrospective festival, showcasing 19 of the curators most loved pieces from past years. The retrospective festival showcased 24 languages from 13 regions. The tenth iteration of the Mother Tongue Film Festival highlighted emerging voices and novel stories while paying homage to the creators we have been grateful to partner with in the past.