Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #2: “Sender”

Redhead woman sits in her house, despairing amid tons of weird packages.

Helly from Severance sprouted a new innie!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: the mystery-shopper thriller Sender — the feature-length debut of writer/director Russell Goldman, which premiered last March at South by Southwest with a small yet mighty cast. It’s based on his previous short Return to Sender, which starred Fargo‘s Allison Tolman and isn’t currently available streaming, unless you count a copy I found with some YouTuber talking over all eighteen minutes of it. So I’m unable to watch it for value-added compare-and-contrast fun — all the more annoying because I just started watching Fargo a few months ago and now I’m intrigued.

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“Sirat”: If You Can Still Feel a Beat, Keep Moving

Sirat movie poster with forlorn man standing in front of Godzilla-sized speakers.

These speakers go to one hundred eleven!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony. Pretty much every single time, at least one of the last films on my to-do list is whichever nominee for Best International Feature is the last to open here in Indianapolis.

I wish I could’ve gotten to the Spanish drama Sirat when it screened at last year’s Heartland Film Festival, which was on my shortlist but got cut because their lineup was too impressive for me to get to everything I wanted to in a single week. (Other regretted cuts included Arco and The Secret Agent.) Fortunately its limited-release rollout reached the Midwest just in time for its two big showdowns for Best International Feature and Best Sound. Fans of the latter category are encouraged to see it somewhere with the strongest speakers possible.

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