Traverse City Gets A New Film Festival In 2026

Traverse City is finally getting a new film festival.

Next spring, from Thursday, April 30 through Sunday, May 3, Traverse City will host a satellite edition of Marquette’s Fresh Coast Film Festival, an outdoor-centric, conservation-focused, documentary-driven festival that has made a name for itself in the Upper Peninsula since launching in 2016. The Traverse City version, which organizer Joe Beyer says is intended to become an annual fixture, will maintain the spirit and traditions of the Marquette festival while adding its own spin – including spotlights on local filmmakers and a few forays into narrative films.

A Sundance Institute veteran, Beyer moved to Traverse City from Los Angeles in 2018 for what ended up being a brief stint as executive director for the Traverse City Film Festival (TCFF). Later that same year, local film producer Nick Loud introduced Beyer to the Fresh Coast Film Festival, and he fell in love with it. Occurring in the middle of October – the 2025 event is happening this weekend – the Marquette festival quickly became an annual pilgrimage for Beyer and his friends. Eventually, he started wondering whether a Traverse City version might be possible – especially after TCFF announced in 2023 it would be discontinuing its festival.

“Nick and I kicked around the idea with a few other people, and thought it was at least worth floating to the Fresh Coast Marquette team,” Beyer tells The Ticker. “When we did that, I think the Fresh Coast folks sensed opportunity here too, for a number of reasons that are entirely mutually beneficial. Film festivals are still recovering from COVID, and the feeling was: any idea to keep the Fresh Coast brand alive was something that appealed to everyone.”

According to Aaron Peterson, one of Fresh Coast’s three co-founders, the festival has been trying to expand its reach for years. “A lot of times, it’s just hard to get a small festival way up north to stand on its own two feet,” he says. That realization led to a Fresh Coast roadshow program, which took festival programming to other Michigan cities for one-night-only presentations.

“And I think the reality sort of set in that, in order to have the revenue gain from doing a series of roadshows, we’d have to create a position, eat up budget, and then they’d just become this self-funding thing," says Peterson. "That’s not the worst situation, because it's still marketing for us, but it wasn’t necessarily ideal either.”

Enter Beyer and Loud, and a team of other Traverse City film fans, with a proposal: bring a version of Fresh Coast to TC, with local organizers and volunteers to relieve Peterson's team of any heavy-lifting. It was, Peterson says, “a no-brainer.”

“Our second highest attendance is actually from Traverse City,” Peterson notes. “The Marquette area, obviously, is first, but Traverse City is not that far behind. So, we know it’s a film community, that it had a fantastic festival for years, and that folks are excited to have one back. And then, on top of that, it will just be a financial shot in the arm for the home festival. It makes sense on all fronts.”

Beyer and Peterson both stress that audiences shouldn’t expect a TCFF redux. Many of the films that will be screened next spring will come from Fresh Coast’s 2025 program, which is heavy on documentaries and other nonfiction work. Much of the content is also shorter-form than what typically populated TCFF’s schedules, with a focus on “curating shorts into playlists or mixtapes,” per Peterson.

“We've always prided ourselves on being a blue-collar, working filmmaker festival,” Peterson explains. “So yes, it’s a lot of short films, and some of it is branded content or client work, but it's damn good client work. That’s the world I come from, and I think it's important to to hold that kind of work up as as filmmaking, because it is filmmaking. As the world evolves, a lot of the industry is shifting from this big-budget Hollywood narrative to that kind of working filmmaker mindset.”

The venues will also look different. TCFF revolved around movie houses (the State Theatre and the Bijou by the Bay) and auditoriums. While Fresh Coast will have a few traditional venues like the City Opera House and The Alluvion, most screenings will happen at more unexpected places, like Right Brain Brewery, Silver Spruce, the Traverse Area District Library, the Up North Pride Community Center, or even ELEV8 Climbing Gym. ELEV8 will also host a free opening night gala and community screening on Thursday, April 30 – which will be simulcast to independent theaters outside of Traverse City, including the Garden Theater in Frankfort and the Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay.

Regarding the State Theatre, Beyer says he did reach out to Michael Moore and the TCFF team, “out of sincere respect and an invitation to collaborate.”

“We didn't hear back, and so we've made our plans without [the State] in our venue strategy, but it's certainly something we could revisit in the future,” Beyer says.

In terms of programming, Beyer is at Fresh Coast in Marquette this weekend, curating a best-of selection of the 100 films screening there. Those films will join a more localized, fiction-forward collection of work in TC.

“We really want to show student work from the area,” Beyer says. “I have been in touch with Interlochen, and we're talking to them about their students getting involved. But really, anything could come along from somebody that lives here or works here, and we’d be happy to take a look at it. Traverse City hasn't had a place to bring all of those projects together and celebrate them as a community, so this will be an outlet for things like that.”

More information about the new festival, including early-bird tickets, can be found here.