Celebrating Cities and Civic Engagement

The annual week-long festival is SF Urban Film Fest’s signature event that includes film screenings, panel discussions, mixers for mingling, and skill-share workshops. We screen documentaries, narratives, short- and long-form films from all over the world. Each festival is organized around a central theme that speaks to urgent urban issues facing San Francisco, while many of the topics we touch upon have global implications such as affordable housing, environmental justice, and community-based planning, to name a few. To ground the discussions in the complexity of specific places, we often partner with community and cultural organizations rooted in different neighborhoods. To that end, the festival programs are held in venues that are meaningful to the people of those communities.

SFUFF focuses its art practice on the medium of film because it is the perfect tool to express community needs and grass-roots visions of what a just and equitable city looks like. Storytelling through film is adaptable, responsive, and can simultaneously harness multiple viewpoints across different timescapes and places. Films can connect personal stories to structural economic and social frameworks that create the context of injustice and inequity, while conveying embedded calls to action. SFUFF utilizes the communal ritual of gathering to watch films, in which participants become emotionally connected to the film’s subjects and subject matter, as a strategic entry point to introduce policy discussion and seeds of action for change.