Alabama Rivers Alliance names 2026 Southern Exposure Film Fellows

Alabama’s documentary pipeline just got another lane for the summer. Alabama Rivers Alliance named its 2026 Southern Exposure Film Fellows, a six-week class that begins June 15 and is built around short documentaries on Alabama’s people, places and wildlife, the kind of work that can move from field production into festivals, campus screenings and community events fast.

That speed matters because Southern Exposure is not a one-off workshop. Alabama Rivers Alliance says the program is now in its 14th year, supported by environmental and conservation partners across the state, and designed to bring emerging filmmakers from across the country into Alabama stories that travel from the mountains to the coast. The finished films do not stay locked in a classroom. Many past Southern Exposure projects have landed in juried festivals around the country, and the program’s screening footprint has stretched from live events to online audiences in Alabama and beyond.

The recent track record shows why the 2026 class deserves attention from anyone tracking Alabama indie docs. The 2024 fellows took on Mobile Bay seagrass loss, women in the environmental movement, native plants and PFAS contamination. The 2025 slate went after salamanders, the water and energy demands of data centers, quarries and veterans finding healing in nature. That is not abstract environmental programming. That is exactly the kind of issue-driven nonfiction that can pull in conservation groups, campus partners and local audiences who want Alabama stories with clear stakes.

That broader ecosystem is already visible in the screening calendar. Southern Exposure says the 2025 films played the Festival of Cranes in Decatur on January 11, 2026, and Auburn University hosted a Southern Exposure screening on April 1, 2026, as part of its Sustainability Film Series. Auburn Outdoors and the Auburn Fly Fishing Club were part of that event, which showed how easily these films can move between theater seats, student groups and community partnerships.

The first announced member of the 2026 class is Moses Aubrey, a documentary filmmaker and science communicator focused on urban wildlife and ecology. He works as a program manager in the Community Science Department of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where he helps bring communities into nature, and he also freelances as a videographer and photographer for nature-based organizations in Los Angeles and Southern California. That background fits Southern Exposure’s mission neatly: bring in filmmakers who can make Alabama’s environmental stories feel local, urgent and built to circulate well beyond one season.