Messages of Peace

Offerings at the Global Peace Film Festival include a documentary about the Pulse nightclub tragedy.

There’s never been a better time for Orlando's Global Peace Film Festival to come around.

The Sept. 19-25 festival stages events and screens documentaries and feature films that revolve around the struggle for peace on Earth. Two of this year’s films, both of which hit especially close to home, will be shown back-to-back on Thursday, Sept. 22, at Rollins College’s Bush Auditorium.

The first, at 6 p.m., is We Are Gay, We Are Proud, We Are Orlando, documentary filmmaker Vicki Nantz’s heartfelt exploration of the community’s reaction to the Pulse nightclub massacre. The second, Rebels with a Cause, a documentary about a historic effort by California environmentalists who saved much of their community’s green spaces from development, will be followed by a panel discussion about a plan to start a long-term acquisition trust to create urban parkland in Winter Park and Orlando.

Other festival offerings include documentaries about refugee families in Syria; profiles of the Dalai Lama, anthropologist Margaret Mead and Robert F. Kennedy; and an exploration of the flamboyant, late-1960s debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley that foreshadowed the heated political acrimony that suffuses today’s television programming.

Festival films are screened at five Central Florida locations. Thursday is the first day of the regular screenings, and every film is screened twice through Sunday. Admission to some films is free. Visit the Global Peace website, peacefilmfest.org, for schedules and information about festival passes and tickets to individual films.