The Calgary Underground Film Festival is set to return this November with a collection of the eclectic, unique, but most of all brain sticking set of documentary films.

The mix for 2025 is one that the programmers for CUFF.Docs have been eagerly awaiting showing to audiences, with more than a few that CUFF Festival Director and Lead Programmer Brenda Lieberman said the team was excited and passionate about putting in front of viewers.

“We always want to make sure we’ve got a certain number of Canadian films, or Indigenous representation, films directed by women, films that might target a different demographic or audience that don’t normally come to CUFF.Docs,” she said.

“But we want to make sure that [audiences] have something that would resonate for them. So it’s kind of how we tend to try and finalize our lineups mixing—still, the end of the day, they’re all films that we’re passionate about, that we’re excited about.”

CUFF.Docs opens on Nov. 19 with a documentary about a band that came from the world of underground hardcore punk, the Butthole Surfers.

Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is joined by Hearse Chasing about the return of singer-songwriter Cassidy Waring to her hometown of Calgary after tragedy strikes, and Nash the Slash Rises Again about the eponymously named Canadian electronic artist who took his sinister moniker from a 1927 silent film killer.

Lieberman said the entire lineup reflects the desire to put the creative, the quirky, and ultimately the enjoyable to watch documentaries on screen.

“We try to give ourselves no rules in that regard. We gravitate to quirky stories and quirky characters and hard to imagine storylines often, but these are some of these are gems that have been discovered in festivals that are quite hard to define,” she said.

Films like André is an Idiot, which had its premiere at Sundance but didn’t achieve the kind of acclaim that other big documentary films did earlier in the year.

“I haven’t been able to get that film out of my mind. It took until now for us to be able to secure a screening of it, because it just actually got a distributor in the last really short while, and we were even able to book book with for Canadian premiere,” said Lieberman.

“Some of these films are in more underground or more music focused festivals and premiering at Sundance and TIFF and Venice, but they’re films that maybe our general audience would miss in those lineups, because those lineups might be quite large, or they could get lost in certain sections, or you’re not following what those festivals are doing necessarily.”

Films worth seeing

She said pulled out of the big festivals and put into CUFF.Docs, those films really get a chance to shine on their own and also connect with audiences.

“There’s so many incredibly strong films in here. There’s films that are fun. There are films that you wouldn’t expect to go and watch, like a film on python hunting. Like you wouldn’t think or know that this is the kind of film that you should or would want to see until you’ve seen it, and you’re like ‘wow, that was very cool,'” Lieberman said.

That includes films like The Librarians about librarians on the front lines of fighting for intellectual freedom in the face of book banning over of LGBTQ2S+ and race issues, to Modern Whore about the experiences of Toronto sex worker Andrea Werhun, and Summer Camp about scouts gathering in the Swiss mountains to find freedom in being a youth.

The festival will also be the world premiere for Liam and Friends, about Indigenous-Calgarian Olympic snowboarder Liam Gill who launched a youth mentorship program in the Northwest Territories, which will be shown as part of the Portraits shorts package.

“We want to support the local indigenous community and the Calgary connections to some of the films. But also we have a large team with some that are very passionate about sport, and that includes snowboarding. So, it’s nice to really just find the diversity, even in the shorts,” said Lieberman.

CUFF.Docs is also seeing the return of CATVIDEOFEST for a third year, which promises 75 minutes of curated cat videos with a charitable twist—10 per cent of the ticket sales going to the Meow Foundation.

“We definitely have a large percentage of our team who are cat dads, cat fanatics, cat owners. Our whole team is quite passionate about animal-related organizations and and videos and films. Over the years, we’ve shown a really interesting variety of films that have been part cat films in different ways,” said Lieberman.

“When we decided to incorporate this into the festival, it wasn’t a big stretch for our team, because it’s a nice way to bring out people of all ages. Everyone can enjoy watching mindless cute cat videos or animal videos on online to kind of distract themselves sometimes from the seriousness of day to day, so why not do it together in a theatre and just have some fun?”

Tickets for the festival showings start at $12, with discounts available for seniors and students. Five-film packs are on sale for $50, and festival passes for the entire showing of the 16 features and shorts package is $75.

“At the end of the day, everything is really accessible and fun. I think anyone who who enjoys documentaries should be able to find some true enjoyment and community out of attending a screening with us at CUFF and CUFF.Docs,” said Lieberman.

CUFF.Docs runs from Nov. 19 to Nov. 23 at the Globe Cinema. More details and tickets at www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/cuffdocs.