Reverence: Reclaiming the Forgotten Earns Recognition on the Film Festival Circuit

Memorial
Written By John Mills

My film, Reverence: Reclaiming the Forgotten has been honored with recognition from three film festivals, marking an encouraging start for a documentary dedicated to restoring the forgotten stories of enslaved people and reconnecting their descendants with their history.

The film's first official selection came from the 2026 San Antonio Black International Film Festival (SABIFF), where Reverence was selected for screening among an international field of independent films celebrating Black storytelling and culture. Screenings will be in San Antonio, TX on October 3, 2026.

The film also received recognition from the Independent Shorts Awards, earning Official Selection honors. The festival recognized Reverence in multiple categories, including Best Documentary Short, Best First-Time Director (Male) and Best Editing.

Most recently, Reverence was named a Semi-Finalist at the 2026 Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF). This is one of the nation's premier international film festivals. Each year the festival receives more than 7,000 submissions from filmmakers around the world while selecting only a small percentage of projects for its official program. The festival is recognized as both a BAFTA Qualifying and Canadian Screen Award Qualifying festival, making this semifinalist recognition a meaningful milestone in my film's festival journey.

While each festival serves a different audience, together these recognitions affirm the documentary's mission: using genealogy, history, and storytelling to restore the lives of people whose stories have too often been left out of the American narrative. These recognitions also place our Connecticut stories in front of the world.

The film continues its festival run with additional screenings and festival decisions expected throughout the coming months.

I am deeply grateful to every descendant, historian, museum professional, reenactor, and community partner who shared their time, knowledge, and trust to help me make this documentary possible.

Also, thank you to everyone who has followed and supported Reverence throughout this journey. I look forward to sharing more news as the festival season continues.

John

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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