Johns Hopkins Short Film THE SHED Selected for Maryland Film Festival 2026

A graduate student from Johns Hopkins University earned a slot at one of Baltimore's most competitive film showcases, with one more public screening still on the calendar for this weekend.

Cla Calabresi, enrolled in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and serving as liaison at the Center for Advanced Media Studies at Hopkins, directed THE SHED, which was officially selected for the 2026 Maryland Film Festival and programmed in the Diverging Forms Shorts Series. That track is reserved for experimental and formally adventurous short work, placing THE SHED among the most unconventional films in a festival presenting more than 170 titles this year.

The film stars actress Heather Bacile as a young woman pulled through phantasmagoric hallucinations while working toward self-forgiveness after a sustained struggle with self-loathing. Visually, the film draws on classic Italian cinema while planting itself inside what critics have termed feminist New Weird, a mode of storytelling that fuses genre experimentation with intimate emotional stakes.

The first screening took place Thursday, April 9, at 11:45 a.m. in Parkway 3 and was followed by a Q&A with Calabresi. The second and final festival screening is this Sunday, April 12, at 3:15 p.m. in the Fred Lazarus IV Auditorium at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Parkway Theatre. That screening will also close with a Q&A. Tickets are general admission through the SNF Parkway website; pass holders receive priority entry and seating is first come, first served.

Sunday's Q&A with Calabresi is worth arriving early for. With a background straddling literary studies and media production, Calabresi is well-positioned to discuss the Italian cinema touchstones embedded in the film's visual grammar, how Bacile's performance was shaped in production, and what resources at Hopkins and within Station North made the project possible. For other Baltimore filmmakers and students still developing their own work, those answers have practical value.

The 27th annual Maryland Film Festival drew roughly 200 filmmakers to the Parkway Theatre and surrounding venues this week in a deliberately competition-free environment. The festival has a documented track record of early discovery: Barry Jenkins, Greta Gerwig, and Kathryn Bigelow are among the filmmakers connected to its history. Being programmed here, particularly in an experimental shorts series, carries the kind of visibility that generates distribution inquiries and future festival invitations.

For Baltimore students and independent filmmakers aiming to get their own work into next year's lineup, submissions are handled through FilmFreeway. The central eligibility requirement is regional premiere status: submitted films cannot have screened publicly in Maryland before the festival dates. The JHU-MICA Film Centre, located at 10 E. North Avenue in the Station North Arts District, provides production infrastructure and academic mentorship for students at both Hopkins and the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is a direct pipeline to opportunities like the one Calabresi landed this week.

Calabresi's selection is a concrete example of how an academic filmmaking program, a few blocks from the festival's own home base, translates into real career momentum inside Baltimore's creative economy.