Festival Basics

The Traverse City Film Festival is a charitable and educational non-profit organization that holds an annual event in one of the most beautiful areas of the country — Traverse City, Michigan. The festival is committed to showing "Just Great Movies" and helping to save one of America's few indigenous art forms — the cinema.

The fourth annual Traverse City Film Festival will be held July 29 through August 3, 2008.

Highlights of the Traverse City Film Festival

The festival present the best of independent, foreign, and documentary films in several indoor movie houses, including the State Theatre, the City Opera House, the Old Town Playhouse, and Lars Hockstad Auditorium In 2007, the festival offered 98 screenings of 66 feature films, up from 52 screenings of 31 films in 2005.

The festival also presents classic movies free of charge on a giant, inflatable outdoor screen overlooking Grand Traverse Bay in the Open Space Park at dusk.

Panel discussions with directors, writers, actors, and other members of the film industry are offered daily.

About the Traverse City Film Festival

The Traverse City Film Festival has already, in its third year, become one of the biggest film festivals in the Midwest. In addition to the 80,000 admissions in summer 2007, the festival pumped millions of dollars into the local economy. Founded by Academy Award winning filmmaker Michael Moore and co-founders, photographer John Robert Williams and New York Times bestselling author Doug Stanton, the festival brought films and filmmakers from around the world to northern Michigan, creating a level of excitement one local paper said was "the best thing to happen here since the Ice Age left us Lake Michigan."