The club affectionately named Mise En Scenesters (MES for short) was founded with one simple goal—to bring more great movies to town by any means necessary. We begged and borrowed projectors, extension cords and folding chairs, we saved every extra dollar we could out of our paychecks to pay for film licensing fees, and booked screenings the way DIY punk bands book their tours. We featured screenings and shows in every bar, restaurant, warehouse or abandoned building we could make the electricity work in, though often not the heat in winter or the AC in summer.

The city, to our surprise and delight, seemed to get a kick out of what we were doing. The audience members at our screenings grew, and with them so did our desire to schedule more and more (and more) films. We went a little crazy with it. Our insatiable urge to share cinema only seemed to get worse. There was only one logical course of action.

With only one chain of cinemas dominating our city, it meant we got almost nothing in the way of classic, independent or genre cinema, let alone film education, and we thought we didn’t have the right to complain about this unless we’d directly try to do something to change it. The film club had been a hit, and with the launch of our Halloween/horror event the Frightening Ass Film Festival, we learned we could stage a mini version of what would later become the CFF formula. The next step was a full scale, multi-day, as-many-great-movies-as-we-could-stuff-into-it film festival.

We had to try. We loved this city nearly as much as we loved movies, and it seemed sad that if we stopped doing what we had been doing, there wouldn’t be much left for serious film fans to watch in a theater setting. Suddenly, it all become so much bigger than us—people were counting on us! To us there is no mission as sacred or as much fun as that of sharing the movies we love with the people we love in a place that we love. And one of the most noble and important things we can all hope to do is inspire future storytellers and world builders to create and learn to use the medium of film as their canvas.