Utah Film & Video Center

The best things in life are free—including over 86% of our programming!

Reaching over 38,000 film lovers annually, Utah Film Center brings the world of film to local audiences through free screenings and post-film discussions, outreach programs, and visiting artists and professionals. Emphasizing social content and artistic excellence, the Utah Film Center presents the best documentary, independent, and dramatic cinema year-around to communities throughout Utah.

We collaborate with various educational and community organizations to promote a diversity of ideas, to provide forums for underrepresented groups, and to develop new audiences for film. Among others, our collaborators include The University of Utah, Natural History Museum of Utah, KUER, and Sundance Institute. The film content presented includes a wide range of topics ranging from science and art to civil rights and environmental issues.

In addition to our free weekly screenings, we curate and organize two annual film festivals. Tumbleweeds Film Festival for Children and Youth is the only festival of its kind in the Intermountain West catering to our community’s youngest moviegoers. Fostering the next generation of filmmakers and film fans, Tumbleweeds features the best independent, documentary, and foreign feature-length films and short film. Committed to presenting films with high production and storytelling values, Tumbleweeds aims to inspire creativity in the three-day festival format, which includes multiple school field trip screenings, film workshops for children, and over 18 screenings for families. Additionally, by partnering with SHIFT, we have expanded our reach by offering local teachers the opportunity to participate in media arts workshops that support core curriculum requirements and tie directly into the festival screenings.

Our other film festival, Damn These Heels (DTH) LGBTQ Film Festival, was Utah Film Center’s first festival. Since it premiered in 2004, DTH has grown into our longest-running annual program. The Festival provides a forum in which LGBTQ issues, ideas, and art are explored through film and discussion. Like Tumbleweeds, DTH has expanded to include free monthly year-round screenings.