SCREENING | THURSDAY, JUNE 18 | 5:30 PM | FREE
Sanctuary Cinema, High Desert Playback & CABQ One present HUMMINGBIRDS + WHO I AM NOT
Join Sanctuary Cinema, in collaboration with the City of Albuquerque, and High Desert Playback for a community film screening of HUMMINGBIRDS and WHO I AM NOT on Thursday, June 18, at 5:30 PM. This special screening includes High Desert Playback as the panel. HDP will be playing back the stories from the audience.
HUMMINGBIRDS (FUll SCREENING)
By Estefanía Contreras & Silvia Del Carmen Castaños
Silvia and Beba tell their own coming-of-age story, transforming their hometown on the Texas-Mexico border into a wonderland of creative expression and activist hijinks. Filmed collaboratively over the final summer of their fleeting youth, their cinematic self-portrait celebrates the power of friendship and joy as tools of survival and resistance.
WHO I AM NOT (20-MINUTE EXERPT ONLY)
By Tünde Skovrán & Skovran Tunde
A taboo-breaking story about two South African intersex people trying to find out what or who determines which gender they should consider themselves to be.
PANELISTS: High Desert Playback
SCHEDULE
Thursday, June 18, 2026
5:30 PM: Arrival
6:00 PM: Dinner
6:30 PM: screening
7:45 PM: Panel/performance
Learn more about Sanctuary Cinema in this conversation between Sanctuary Cinema founders, Shiloh Burton and Luis Peña-Álvarez, and FUSION staff writer, Rudolfo Carrillo, “Shelter from a Storm: Narrative Sovereignty at Sanctuary Cinema.”
ABOUT HIGH DESERT PLAYBACK
Founded in 2023 by Lynn Johnson and Allison Kenny, High Desert Playback is a New Mexico–based theater collective dedicated to social change through storytelling, community dialogue, and collective healing. Rooted in Playback Theatre, the multiracial, queer- and trans-centered ensemble transforms real-life stories into live performance, creating participatory spaces where lived experience becomes a catalyst for connection, reflection, and liberation. Building on years of collaborative work in Oakland, California—including the co-founding of Oakland Freedom Theater—the company brings an equity-centered approach to community engagement across New Mexico.
Through performances, workshops, and facilitated dialogue, High Desert Playback centers the voices of those historically marginalized, erased, or excluded, using theater as a tool to deepen empathy, strengthen belonging, and inspire civic and cultural transformation. By inviting participants to witness and share stories across difference, the ensemble cultivates spaces grounded in compassion, accountability, and the belief that collective storytelling can help reimagine more just and connected communities.
ABOUT SANCTUARY CINEMA
A brave space for transformative justice and belonging through film.
Founded in 2025 by shiloh burton and Luis Peña-Alvarez, Sanctuary Cinema (SC) is a New Mexico–based nonfiction film and community dialogue project dedicated to creating brave spaces for belonging, reflection, and transformative justice through documentary film. Anchored in narrative sovereignty, SC screens stories told by those most impacted, honoring lived experience as essential knowledge and rejecting passive spectatorship by fostering audience engagement, collective storytelling, and civic action.
The free, monthly series activates accessible public venues across Albuquerque, pairing POV/PBS films with facilitated panels, local filmmakers, cultural workers, nonprofit partners, and audience participation. By bridging artistic, civic, and community worlds, Sanctuary Cinema builds trust, strengthens relationships, and provides pathways for meaningful local engagement, using documentary film as a catalyst for collective care, collaboration, and community-led change.