How We Program

Our emphasis is on films with a strong point of view. We want to know that the person who made this film had something they actually wanted to say.

Entertainment has its place. We screen plenty of films that are genuinely fun to watch, films with strong narrative drive that pull you along. But that's not what we're chasing.

The range of what film can do is so much bigger than whether something is "fun." If you only ever experience film as entertainment, you're cutting yourself off from most of what the medium is capable of.

We're proud to show films that will probably never have any commercial appeal, because they matter as art and as records of human experience. We want to challenge our audience.

We think the people of Kansas City who show up for film are smart enough and curious enough to sit with difficult ideas and unconventional films, and we program accordingly.

Our Programming Team

Our programming team is entirely volunteer: filmmakers, people who study and write about film, and people who just love watching movies. Every submission gets watched in full and reviewed by the team, both with a scoring rubric and with a written review. We also get together regularly to watch and talk through films as a group, which lets us dig into a film more than any one person reviewing alone.

Scheduling & "Block" Building

Building the schedule is a group effort too. We think about how films sit next to each other, what gets paired with what, and how a block of films builds into something larger than any single screening. We're not just filling slots. We're trying to build a real experience for the people in the seats.

All of it, the reviewing, the discussion, the scheduling, comes from the same place: respect. Respect for the artists who trusted us with their work, and respect for the audience who's giving us their time.