By Alexis González, Bates Class of 2026

The moment a film reaches the screen is never where its story begins.

 By the time a film makes its way to the Bates Film Festival, it has already moved through different audiences, different spaces, and more conversations than most people ever get to see. Some films arrive having already screened at places like the Sundance Film Festival or the Toronto International Film Festival, carrying a certain level of recognition with them. Others show up without that same visibility, and we don’t really know what to expect when we press play.

“That’s what makes the Bates Film Festival feel so different. It’s not just a place where films are shown; it’s also a place where films continue to take shape. The screening may feel like the final step, but in many ways, it’s where the film begins all over again.”

When I first started working on the Bates Film Festival, I assumed those differences would matter more than they actually do. After spending time watching submissions and talking through them with other students, I started to realize that where a film has been matters a lot less than what it does once people actually start engaging with it. Some films immediately grab your attention with stunning visuals and polished filmmaking, but don’t always stay with you for very long. Others take more time. They might move slower, leave certain questions unanswered, or even feel a little messy at first. But then someone brings up a scene I hadn’t thought much about, or points out something I completely missed, and suddenly the film starts opening up in ways it hadn’t before. Those are usually the films that keep coming back into conversation. Throughout the selection process, moments like these completely changed how I thought about what makes something feel like a Bates Film Festival film. It has less to do with budget, style, or even name recognition, and more to do with whether a film continues to reveal something after the credits roll. The films that stay with you are not always the loudest or most polished. Sometimes they’re the ones that leave you sitting with a question a little longer than expected.

As those conversations continued, the process started to become about more than just whether a film was interesting or entertaining. At a certain point, we had to be able to explain why a film belongs in our festival. This is where advocating for our favorites became such an important part of the process. It was not just about saying a film was strong or well made. It was about being able to explain why it mattered in the context of Bates, our values, and our audience, what conversations it might open, how it could connect with other films in the lineup, and what it brought to the larger experience of the festival. I started realizing that advocating for a film was less about convincing people that it was “good” and more about helping others see what it could do within the festival itself. From there, our programming process started to feel less like selecting individual films and more like building relationships between them. As we kept watching movies and discussing them, certain themes began to emerge. Questions about performance, memory, identity, social justice, and the role of the arts started appearing in different ways across completely different films. Sometimes, an individual film would completely change how I understood another. What first looked like a collection of separate submissions started to feel more like a conversation.

“A film doesn’t become meaningful because of the laurels attached to it or the places it has already screened. What matters more is how it lands in the room. What it starts. What it challenges. What it leaves people thinking about after the credits roll. And that part is almost impossible to predict if you watch a movie alone. You can watch a film on your laptop, take notes, and spend hours discussing it, but you never fully know how it will exist in a festival setting until it’s in front of an audience.”

That also changed the way I thought about the festival circuit itself. From an outside perspective, it can be easy to assume that bigger festivals automatically carry more value, or that a film’s importance comes from where it premiered. But working on the Bates Film Festival has complicated that. A film doesn’t become meaningful because of the laurels attached to it or the places it has already screened. What matters more is how it lands in the room. What it starts. What it challenges. What it leaves people thinking about after the credits roll. And that part is almost impossible to predict if you watch a movie alone. You can watch a film on your laptop, take notes, and spend hours discussing it, but you never fully know how it will exist in a festival setting until it’s in front of an audience. That’s when you experience someone laughing when you didn’t expect. That’s when you hear a room go completely silent during a scene you barely noticed the first time you watched the movie. That’s when one comment after a screening can shift how everyone thinks about a movie they just watched. And those things happened repeatedly throughout the planning process for the 2026 Bates Film Festival.

That’s what makes the Bates Film Festival feel so different. It’s not just a place where films are shown; it’s also a place where films continue to take shape. The screening may feel like the final step, but in many ways, it’s where the film begins all over again.