A Feast for the Eyes: Fungi Film Festival (6th Edition)
- Corrado Nai
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Too long to read? Go for the highlights below.
The Fungi Film Festival, now in its 6th edition, showcases 16 films from 8 countries exploring mushrooms, lichens, and micro fungi beyond typical infection narratives
The 2025 festival features diverse creators including researchers, foragers, artists, and entrepreneurs, demonstrating the broad cultural appeal of mycology
Streaming until 4 January 2026, the festival subverts common tropes by presenting fungi as companions for discovery rather than agents of disease
Forget The Last of Us! There are plenty of instances of fungi making it on screen other than the videogame-slash-HBO-series hit. Few people remember, for instance, that giant mushrooms appear in one of the first movie ever made, George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902).
Perhaps the most eclectic example is the yearly Fungi Film Festival. Founded by Peter McCoy in 2020 and currently in its 6th edition, Fungi Film Fest is “the world’s only film festival dedicated to the beauty, otherworldliness, and human influences of mushrooms, lichens, and micro fungi”. Submissions are open to amateur and professional filmmakers.
The Fest can be streamed on demand from 4 December 2025 to 4 January 2026, this year showing 16 films from 8 countries for over 3,5 hours of fungal galore. The show is a blend of shorts (animation, comedy, documentary, experimental, horror, and music videos) plus the full-length feature Tie Die (80:08) by Morgan Miller (USA).
The festival awards ever year five movies in five categories, including “Most Edutaining” and “Audience Choice”. My personal favourites this year were the documentary Peaks to Prairie: A Holistic Regenerative Approach (19:59) by Chad Weber (USA), which won the “Most Edutaining” award, and the documentary-comedy Bumps on Sticks (3:56) by Riitta Ikonen, Ben Kinsley (USA). I was never a fan of AI-generated visuals but happy to see less of them this year.
What makes the event a joy to watch is that it is excellent in subverting common tropes: in Fungi Film Festival, fungi aren’t just agents of infection and disease, but much more. The festival brings us closer the mystery of fungi. It shows fungi as companions to discover. It transforms the “3rd kingdom” of fungi into a “1st kindom”.
Fungi Film Festival seems niche, but it isn’t. The genres, styles, cinematic techniques, themes, and topics are many. Fungi are very diverse, and so are the movies in Fungi Film Festival.
And just consider the creators and protagonists of this year’s movies, all sharing their awe for fungi: researchers, citizen scientists, educators, animators, illustrators, storytellers, practitioners, growers, foragers, explorers, entrepreneurs, environmental activists, architects, community organisers, poets, artists, creators, photographers. It makes me think about the lines in Sylvia Plath’s poem, Mushrooms (1959): "So many of us! So many of us!"
(Bonus tip to discover more: the Instagram account “Fungi in Films” (@fungi_in_films) curated by New Yorker fungal artist Phyllis Ma.)
It’s a bit ironic that a festival on such a large group of organisms and with such a breadth of topics and genres is considered niche. Perhaps this is because the audience is still rather small, or it is simply a reflection of the common perception of fungi.
Fungi Film Festival is bringing fungi closer to a general audience through movies, one film and one edition at the time, and we should be grateful to the organisers. I can’t wait for the 2026 edition.
About the Author
Corrado Nai is a science writer with a PhD in fungal ecology and initiator of the Fungal Artist Open Directory inviting all fungal artists to join. He is currently working on a graphic novel about the forgotten woman who introduced agar to the laboratory, Fanny Angelina Hesse, which can be supported through Patreon. His favourite movies in past editions of Fungi Film Festival are the comedy Fly Amanita (2010) by David Fenster and the documentary Wrought (2022) by Anna Sigrithur and Joel Penner.
