Born in the wake of the 2024 election and premiering in New England this weekend, a new traveling film festival shows the power of collective action in turbulent times.

“Resistance of Vision” is a thematic series of short film packages focused on social justice cinema, all designed for political organizers working on the issues portrayed in the films. It was created by Anna Feder and Jeff Ross, who met through their work on previous festivals.

Ross co-founded San Francisco Indie Fest in 1998 and is still the director of the organization, despite moving to Salem last September. He had long kept up with Feder’s work curating the Bright Lights Cinema Series at Emerson College, which was abruptly canceled in summer 2024. After Feder was let go from that job, Ross saw an opportunity to collaborate.

“It hurt my heart that this thing that I had built with students, faculty, staff, alumni at Emerson has gone away, that someone could just kill it,” Feder said. “So I’m just taking that energy and my love and my passion, and I’m finding a different outlet to do the same thing.”

A few days after the 2024 presidential election, Ross called Feder to make the pitch. He’d run the administrative side of the festival, and she’d curate the films. The new shorts-specific festival that came out of those conversations, “Resistance of Vision,” is under the umbrella of SF Indie Fest but has a very different mission.

The goal of the festival is to foster community organizing, which Feder hopes to achieve by organizing the five short film programs into different thematic sections, ranging from housing rights to racial justice.

“This festival is about getting together with the folks in your community who are working on issues that are important to you,” she said, “and to feel the energy of folks who are continuing the work in the face of immense repression.”

An inspiration for “Resistance of Vision” was the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which operated for over 30 years but folded in March 2024. Ross felt that was “a lost opportunity to really promote films of this kind,” he said.

Ross borrowed the traveling model from the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, an environmental action-focused event that is based in Nevada City, California but has traveled to over 100 cities across the country.

“Resistance of Vision” launches nationally in independent theaters throughout May, with initial screenings on May 1 in Alabama and Kansas, May 3 at The Brattle and May 31 in San Francisco. There will be eight short films screened at each of the live premieres on the topics of environmental, gender, housing and labor and environmental justice. These events offer a highlight reel for the traveling festival, giving a taste of the program themes that groups can then book directly through the festival’s online platform.

Feder and Ross felt strongly that the festival should be seen across the United States, and not just California and New England, where the organizers have strong ties. “The stories need to be seen and heard and talked about in other parts of the country,” Ross said.

The goal is to encourage in-person discussions, which the duo felt is hard these days. “That’s the only way to move forward with anything that you’re trying to achieve is with conversations with people that agree with you, with people who disagree with you,” Ross said. “You have to talk about it, or else nothing really happens. And so we’re hoping to spark those conversations.”

They are also working on making the experience accessible. While the films will get the standard theatrical treatment during the May launch, Feder and Ross are working on creating resources tailored to community groups such as screening guides, MP4 files for easy at-home streaming and pre-recorded interviews, among other things.

All the films will have open captions, and The Brattle’s post-screening panel will be live-captioned by a Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) provider, Feder confirmed.

The festival is mainly intended to screen outside of movie theaters, at community centers, religious centers and the like. Those will become available after the first launch event, and interested parties can reach out to the team via their website to license a screening for $300. Approximately half of that fee goes to the filmmakers, Feder said, and the other half goes to overhead.

It’s a scrappy festival, a true labor of love, and organizers have donated their time to get it off the ground. Now, Feder is looking for partners and national organizations who might cover the licensing fees to subsidize free community screenings.

“I could see an organization like Planned Parenthood coming on board and supporting the work that we’re doing,” she said, referring to the festival’s reproductive rights-focused group of films.

A highlight from the launch program includes “Local One” by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, a follow-up from the Oscars-shortlisted documentary “Union” about a group of Amazon workers’ efforts to unionize their Staten Island warehouse. An animated documentary, “Feeling the Apocalypse,” follows a psychotherapist struggling with climate anxiety. The launch program will close out with “Resist: The Resistance Revival Chorus,” a nonfiction portrait of an all-woman chorus that transforms social movement songs into a stirring call to action.

The program is wide-ranging, but that’s the point. It’s supposed to convey the sense that these movements are all working toward similar goals.

“Sometimes people end up sort of in a silo of their own issue. And that’s what they spend their days working on,” Ross said. “But really, all these issues are interconnected in a lot of ways, and my dream is that they’ll talk amongst themselves and figure out how they can work together and achieve their goals together.”

“The antidote to repression is information and connection,” Feder said, referring to the current political climate. “What’s different from a film festival than just seeing a movie in a theater, the way folks normally do, is there’s this opportunity to have conversation.”

That’s where the panel discussions come in. At Saturday’s Brattle screening, Feder will moderate a conversation between local New England activists, including former Rhode Island state Senator Cynthia Mendes; Illona Yosefov, chief steward for Emerson College’s chapter of the SEIU 888 union; Nicholas H. McCaskill, interim president of Trans Resistance MA; and Adam Nuñez, a journalism student at Emerson who works with Boston Common Coalition for the Homeless and Salem Survival Program.

“When all of the forces are working to keep us disconnected, apathetic and afraid,” Feder said, “continuing to fight against that, to get louder with each other, is how we resist.”