After a sold-out inaugural year, CINTIMA is bringing its Flicker Festival back to Los Angeles on Oct. 22.
Launched in 2025, the SAG-AFTRA-accredited intimacy coordinator training org’s event is billed as a first-of-its-kind curated festival celebrating intimacy-as-art in cinema. Uplifting stories of connection, tenderness, power, desire, trust, longing, humor, grief and repair across a breadth of genres and formats, festival organizers welcome live-action, documentary, advertising, animation, experimental, digital and new-media work. Submissions to partake in the October event are now open.
“Intimacy is our birthright — life is created through intimacy, and storytelling is one of the most powerful ways we reclaim it,” CINTIMA founder and Flicker director Yehuda Duenyas said in a statement. “Flicker exists to champion filmmakers who treat intimacy with artistry and ethics, and to spotlight the creative collaboration that intimacy coordination makes possible.”
The festival was founded as the industry came to embrace intimacy coordination as part of production in the wake of #MeToo. SAG-AFTRA formally recognized intimacy coordinators as protected creative labor just last month — news that serves as the perfect launchpad for Flicker’s return.
Flicker’s first edition featured a mix of emerging and established filmmakers alongside legacy titles, including John Cameron Mitchell’s “Shortbus” and Stephen Winters’ “Chocolate Babies.”
Going into the 2026 installment, the festival named “The Bear” writer Sofya Levitsky-Weitz as the first member of its jury, with additional judges to be announced.
Awards categories for the 2026 festival include:
- Grand Jury / Best in Show
- Best Intimacy in Storytelling
- Most Expansive View of Intimacy
- Best Direction
- Best Intimacy Choreography
- Most Innovative Vision
- Audience Choice Award
New to the festival this year, Flicker is also expanding submissions to include short films up to seven minutes in length, as well as scene excerpts from features, series, pilots and works-in-progress.
“The response to year one made it clear: this platform is needed,” Duenyas, who can next be seen promoting his work on Gregg Araki’s Olivia Wilde and Charli XCX starrer “I Want Your Sex” at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, added.
“Flicker spotlights not only the extraordinary impact intimacy has on the human condition, but also to the extraordinary work intimacy coordinators bring to the language of film and new media,” he said. “We’re building a community where their voices are supported and amplified. We’re incredibly excited to expand those opportunities in our second year of Flicker.”
Find more information on Flicker Festival 2026 here.
