About

The State Theatre

The Traverse City Film Festival completely renovated the shuttered historic downtown movie house, the State Theatre, and reopened it in November 2007. The festival now owns and operates the State as a year-round, community-based, mission-driven, and volunteer-staffed art house movie theater. The State shows films for kids on Saturday mornings at 10 a.m. and great classic films for seniors at 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, both for just 25 cents! The theater also has a community night on Monday nights when community groups, including the student film club and local churches, show films. We have a Sunday Cinema Guild Series for hard-core cinema lovers that brings the best in international film to Traverse City. And we have a $3 Friday Night Flicks series offering the best of midnight and cool great films late at night. We also do many free events open to the public, including an open house week during spring break, student films, and sporting events like the St. Francis Football Game Championships and Michigan vs. Michigan State games. We also broadcast the Metropolitan Opera live in high definition, bring the Times Talks series to Traverse City, run holiday series, and bring premieres and special films to the community on a regular basis. We truly want everyone to be able to attend the theater, so we also offer very inexpensive concessions — we have $1.00 candy, and you can get popcorn and soda for $2.00.

The Traverse City Film Festival is a charitable, educational, nonprofit organization committed to showing “Just Great Movies” and helping to save one of America’s few indigenous art forms — the cinema. The festival brings films and filmmakers from around the world to northern Michigan for the annual film festival in late July to early August. The festival donates copies of each film it shows during the festival to 3-10 local area public libraries so that people throughout the region can see the films for free. The festival hopes to open minds and hearts by bringing great films from all over the world about topics of all kinds to people of all ages and income levels.

The festival was founded by Academy Award-winning Director Michael Moore, who runs the festival and serves as president of the board of directors. Other board members are photographer John Robert Williams and New York Times best-selling author Doug Stanton, both Traverse Citians, and filmmakers Larry Charles (director, “Borat”), Terry George (director, “Hotel Rwanda”), Sabina Guzzanti (director, “Viva Zapatero!”), and Christine Lahti (actor, “Running on Empty”). All of the board members are volunteers. None of them receives any compensation for their work on behalf of the TCFF and the State Theatre.