Film & Friends.
A pipeline for radical, community-powered filmmaking, premiering work from our MAKE SOMETHING students.
✦ Photos & video by Artist Access Program participants Sheridan Rodgers & Minnie Jackson
Six films. One night.
A Foul But Familiar Sound
A short film of understanding and consequence.
DIVINA: The Docushort!
A fan-made, DIY telling of Divina, Austin's longest-running all-Latinx drag show.
The Dull Edge
A woman drives cross-country to a new city, suspended in the liminal space between who she was and who she's becoming, where the quiet beauty of starting over shares the passenger seat.
STILL HERE
A woman steps back into dating for the first time, while something lingering refuses to leave the frame.
WORKBOT
Arthur, an aloof call-center worker, is the only one who realizes the new hire is a robot named "Kyle." The office is infatuated, but Arthur sees Kyle is making them all obsolete.
OTILIA
In a rural Indigenous community, a 12-year-old girl faces an arranged marriage that will shape the rest of her life. Silent and watchful, Otilia moves through loyalty, fear, and the quiet pressure of tradition as she confronts a future chosen for her.
What you can expect at every Film & Friends.
5–10 short films
Each night brings five to ten short films, sometimes a single evening, sometimes spread across two.
Every form
Narrative, experimental, music video, and short documentary: the full range of short-form storytelling, side by side.
Made in Texas
Every film comes from Texan filmmakers, rooted in the places and communities they're telling stories about.
Often a first
For many of these filmmakers, it's the very first time their work meets a public audience.
The films end. The conversation doesn't.
Process, cracked open.
Filmmakers break down exactly how they pulled it off: the choices, the hacks, the workarounds. No mystique, no gatekeeping. The craft, demystified and handed straight to you.
Voices the industry shuts out.
The mic goes to the people too often left off the stage. This is what diversifying film actually looks like: not a panel about representation, the real thing, live and unfiltered.
The scene, building itself.
Audience meets makers. Makers meet makers. The next crew, the next collaboration, the next film starts right here in the room, a movement assembling in real time.
One night. One screening.
This isn't your standard screening.
Storytelling is the fabric of our culture: how we remember, how we resist, how we imagine something better. Film isn't just content. It's protest. It's memory. A tool for radical expression and real change.
In a world where filmmaking is too often gatekept, commercialized, and stripped of its soul, Film & Friends does the opposite. We put the mic in the hands of the people who rarely get it: underrepresented voices and first-time filmmakers. We let them make work entirely on their own terms.
Every screening is somebody's first audience, somebody being seen for the first time. That's how the next generation of Texan storytellers finds its footing, and how the culture gets rewritten by the people who've been left out of it. Radical, unfiltered, and built in public, one screening at a time.
Your ticket is a fundraiser.
Austin School of Film is Texas' first and longest-running community film school: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit powered by the people, and by the people working in film and media arts.
We're built to create a pathway for all types of creators, and every seat you buy goes straight back into the programs that put these films on screen. Affordable classes, real equipment, studio space, and a home for the people the industry leaves out.
When you buy a ticket to Film & Friends, you're not just catching a screening, you're funding the next one. Culture is infrastructure, and you're helping us build it.
Where your ticket goes
See the films. Fund the future.
Captured by Sheridan Rodgers and Minnie Jackson, Artist Access Program participants.