The Sedona International Film Festival, which is at once the premiere arts event and the largest member-supported organization in Sedona, will be celebrating its 30th anniversary in February 2024 with a lineup of its biggest stars and best films of the last three decades.

SIFF began in 1995 as a fundraiser for the Sedona Cultural Park. At that time, ground had not yet been broken on the Georgia Frontiere Performing Arts Pavilion, and the festival was intended to aid the park’s construction while also providing opportunities for collaboration with Yavapai College’s newly-established Zaki Gordon Institute for Independent Filmmaking at the Cultural Park.

“There were four women who founded the festival,” executive director Patrick Schweiss explained. “Marion Herrman, Lori Seymour, Pinky Greenberg and Shirlin Hyatt. These ladies, on a whim, went out to Sundance one time, just to experience the festival, and they came back and went, ‘We can do this. We have got to try this in Sedona.’”

In its early days, the festival ran for part of Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday, showing roughly 30 films each season. The program remained limited until 2003, when the Cultural Park went into bankruptcy due to mismanagement.

Sheila Jackman and other committed supporters then formed a new independent nonprofit to save the film festival from the financial wreckage. In June 2004, the festival’s board picked Schweiss to be its director, a position he has held ever since.

“My first years, I kept adding a day,” Schweiss recalled. “Mainly it was because my friends were all like, ‘Wow, you left a cushy job at the newspaper for a two-and-a-half-day event? What do you do the other 51 weeks of the year?’ So I’m like, ‘That’s a good question. I don’t know!’ So I just kept adding a day because the town was supportive, people were coming out.”

More pragmatically, Schweiss thought that since the festival was a member-based organization, it needed to be able to grow its membership base and to offer those new members something in return for their membership. He began by renting one of the Harkins theatres every month for a “Second Tuesday” cinema series and bringing in a film and film – maker for the occasion.

“It started taking off,” Schweiss said. “Within a year and half or two years, we were doing a 4 o’clock and a 7 o’clock. Then we moved to the bigger theatre. Then we did a four-week Sundance series. Then a four-week foreign film series. And we suddenly realized we were renting Harkins 45 of the 52 Tuesdays of the year. We’re like, maybe the community can support an art-house theatre and we can have films every single day. And that’s when we investigated building the first theatre.”

The process to build a permanent home for the festival began in 2011, and succeeded thanks to the support of its eventual namesake, philanthropist Mary D. Fisher, who funded more than 80% of the project, which was completed the following year.

“Mary fell in love with Sedona,” Schweiss reminisced. “She kept coming to Sedona to visit, and then she came to a film festival event, and fell in love with us and became one of our big donors. She got really passionate about independent film.

“Her fame came in 1992. She was the keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention, George Bush’s — the father’s — national convention. She spoke on AIDS and the fact that AIDS is not just a gay man’s disease and we have to pay attention to this, and she came out as one of the first women to be HIV-positive … She got a standing ovation. Instantly recognizable overnight.”

“She initially didn’t want her name on the building. I talked her into it,” Schweiss added.

One of the first films shown in the new Mary D. Fisher Theatre was the Neil Patrick Harris vehicle “Company,” which had special relevance for one of SIFF’s greatest supporters: Marion Herrman, who in her younger days had owned the Tuxedo Junction nightclub in New York.

“She was in a scooter at that point,” Schweiss said. “She comes scooting around the corner, tears falling down her face, and she said, ‘I never thought I’d experience New York anywhere again, and you brought New York to me here in Sedona. Bless you.’”

Less fortunately, 2012 was also the year that the Zaki Gordon Institute relocated to Liberty University after being starved of funds and support by Yavapai College.

“We had a wonderful relationship. I miss that film school,” Schweiss said. “It’s really sad that Sedona lost that, because it was such a coup for us to have a film school in our community … The good part is I got my tech people from them. Both of their documentary instructors came to work for us.”

SIFF had previously served as an entry-level experience for film students, offering them the chance to have their shorts screened before main features.

One of the school’s most successful graduates, Sedona Red Rock High School alumnus Mustafa “Toby” Eck, has screened five of his films at SIFF and got his start there, like many others, with one of his student works.

In 2021, SIFF expanded its footprint again when it added the smaller Alice Gill-Sheldon Theatre to its complex. The expansion was funded in part by a $1 million donation from a Sedona resident who insisted on remaining anonymous, and by another substantial contribution from Alan and Alice Sheldon.

The theatre’s name honored Alice Sheldon, who, under her maiden name of Alice Gill, was a professional dancer for 20 years and loved SIFF’s ballet films.

“I went to him and said, ‘Hey, Alan, I want to have lunch with you and Alice. Bring your checkbook, it’s going to be an expensive lunch!’” Schweiss laughed. “But again, Alice and Alan are true philanthropists.”

By 2019, and in preceding years, film festival attendance had risen to between 10,500 and 12,000, with more than 40,000 individual tickets being sold. The COVID-19 pandemic response measures imposed by Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Sedona Mayor Sandy Moriarty delayed the start of the 2020 festival to June, and the climate of fear prevalent at the time reduced 2021 attendance to roughly half. Attendance had recovered almost entirely by the time of the 2023 festival.

“I have a really good feeling about 2024,” Schweiss said. “We’ve seen people come back to the theatre.”

Locals account for between 40% and 45% of the festival’s attendance, with visitors from the Phoenix metro area making up another 25%. The remainder come from out of state, and those proportions have remained surprisingly consistent over the years.

Wherever they hail from, cinephile now enjoy an experience massively expanded from SIFF’s early days. The nine-day festival now shows around 150 films each February, not including films brought back during the year. Schweiss noted that documentaries tend to be “hugely popular” during the festival itself, while there is more public interest in feature films during the festival off-season. The mix of features and documentaries offered at SIFF has shifted over time from roughly 60-40 to closer to 50- 50, reflecting audience interest. The festival receives between 1,400 and 1,500 submissions each year, which are then reviewed by screening committees, who pick the final selections.

“It was hellish to get a good film. They didn’t want us,” Schweiss recalled of the early days. “We now have distributors and filmmakers calling us … it’s completely turned around from 20 years ago when I started, when it would take me six months just to get someone to return a call.”

He attributed the turnaround to the festival’s growing reputation among film lovers and auteurs — as well as a fortunate threesome during the Harkins Tuesday series.

“Three films remain my favorite,” Schweiss said. “Not necessarily because they’re the greatest films we’ve shown, but because of what it did for us. ‘Mrs. Henderson Presents,’ with Judi Dench; ‘Transamerica,’ with Felicity Hoffman; and ‘Keeping Mum’ with Maggie Smith. We had those three weeks in a row in our series, and all of a sudden, I could get any film I wanted to show. And now Sony, who would never ever play with me, is giving us their films to show.”

SIFF’s reputation has come to extend beyond its film choices, with festival-goers returning as much for the hospitality they experience in Sedona as for the showings. Every year, local hotels donate about 900 room-nights for visiting filmmakers and actors.

“It’s our reputation, and part of that is our community’s reputation,” Schweiss elaborated. “I get note after note after note and email after email after email when the festival’s done from filmmakers saying, ‘We’ve never experienced more sophisticated audiences than your festival. They ask intelligent questions. They’re interested in talking with us after the shows. They engage with us when we’re outside the theatres. They’re incredible hosts.’”

About 50 volunteers run SIFF’s day-to-day operations. During festival season, that number increases to around 130.

When Schweiss took the organization over, it had close to 300 volunteers. He has since sought to reduce the number of individual volunteers in order to make returning visitors feel at home when they recognize the same people taking care of them year after year.

“Rip Torn was probably the most interesting character who’s ever been at our festival, because all he wanted to do when he got here was fly fish,” Schweiss remembered. “He came in his jeans that he had been fly fishing in that afternoon. Ed Asner was here five times. He and Andrew McCarthy were my first celebrity guests at my first festival in 2005. He loved us so much that every time he had a film project, he would call and say, ‘Can I have the filmmaker send you this film, and I’ll come out if you want to program it.’”

Robert Osborne, another returning guest, used to call Schweiss “the king of Sedona.” Less of a success was Mira Sorvino, whose dog escaped from Sedona Rouge, leading to the dispatch of festival volunteers in pursuit.

Other past attendees have included Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Naomi Watts, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara and Pierce Brosnan.

For the 30th anniversary, Schweiss plans to bring back some of the guests who have had the longest history with the festival, starting with Diane Ladd, Andrew McCarthy and Mary Stuart Masterson, whose new film, ‘Isle of Hope,’ is tentatively slated for opening night. Brad Paisley, who has attended a number of times, is another possibility.

In the longer term, SIFF’s professional plans call for it to eventually purchase the festival buildings, with a goal of making the complex more of a film educational facility as well as a theatre.

“It’s this little thing that shouldn’t have been, but is, has been and continues to grow,” Schweiss said. “We can only equate that with the support we get from the community … We’re committed to making the 30th year even more of a thank-you note and a love letter to the people of Sedona. We’ve been here for 30 years because of the support that we’re getting.”