For four years, the Healdsburg International Short Film Festival and the Healdsburg Center for the Arts' Festival of the Arts ran on their own separate clocks. One filled the Raven Theater with directors and jurors from around the world every September. The other filled the Plaza, or wherever the city let it land that year, with painters, potters, and printmakers. They shared a town of about eleven thousand people and roughly the same volunteer pool, but they never shared a date.
This year they do. HISFF runs September 25 through 27 at the Raven, its fifth edition. The Center for the Arts holds its Festival of the Arts on Saturday, September 26, one block over on Center Street. The two organizations built this overlap on purpose. If you live in Healdsburg, that decision changes how this particular weekend works, and it says something about how a small town's cultural calendar actually gets assembled: through two boards choosing to coordinate their dates.
A Theater Volunteers Refused to Let Die
The Raven wasn't always a cultural anchor. It opened in 1949 as a small movie house named the Aven, a reversal of the original owner's wife's name, with the R added to the marquee later. By 2000, falling attendance and new competition pushed the building toward a sale that could have ended it as a public space entirely. A group of local residents stepped in, incorporated as Healdsburg Performing Arts Theater in 2001, leased the building, and exercised their purchase option in 2005 for roughly $850,000.
That history matters here because it explains why the Raven isn't just a rental screening room for a film festival. It's the same volunteer-run building that now hosts the Raven Players, Philharmonia Healdsburg, school performances for Healdsburg Elementary, Westside, and St. John's, and more than 130 productions a year. When HISFF books the Raven for a weekend, it's borrowing a piece of civic infrastructure that a few dozen residents personally saved twenty-five years ago. That's a different kind of venue than a multiplex, and it's part of why the festival's organizers, Kirk and Pamela Demorest, built the event around this specific 350-seat house rather than a rented hall somewhere off Healdsburg Avenue.
The Numbers Behind a Weekend That Looks Casual
It's easy to assume a hometown short film festival is a low-key, come-one-come-all affair. The submission math says otherwise. The Healdsburg Tribune reported that this year's lineup pulled 57 films from 17 countries out of 398 submissions, a selection rate of roughly one in seven. The Tribune also quoted Pamela Demorest describing the review process as something that runs almost year round: "we start when the last one is finished." That's not a weekend project. That's a festival competitive enough to draw filmmakers from around the globe and still turn away the majority of what shows up.
The jury reflects that reach. Tom Waits, who lives locally, returns for his fourth or fifth year depending on which festival cycle you count from. Ed Begley Jr. is judging for the fifth time. Laraine Newman, an original Saturday Night Live cast member, and Jeff Kober, an Emmy winner with more than 55 feature film credits, round out the panel. Screenwriter Billy Ray, who wrote Captain Phillips and co-wrote the first Hunger Games film, returns for his second year on the jury and adds a public event: a Saturday, September 26 book signing at 11 a.m. at the Raven, held with Copperfield's Books, for his new YA novel Burn the Water.
Why the Arts Festival Moved to Center Street
The Festival of the Arts has its own recent history worth knowing before you plan your Saturday. For years it filled the Plaza itself, a location Travel and Leisure once singled out as one of the country's most beautiful town squares. Over the past couple of years, city council efforts to shift signature events toward the newer Foley Family Community Pavilion made the festival's location a point of neighborhood debate, with some residents wondering whether last year's Plaza gathering would be the final one held there.
This year's compromise puts the festival on Center Street, off the historic Plaza, on September 26. It's close enough to keep the feel that made the event a fixture for decades, and it leaves the Pavilion question aside for this year. More than 35 artist booths will line the street with ceramics, woodwork, jewelry, printmaking, and painting from Sonoma County makers, alongside music and food and wine.
That single date, September 26, is what makes this year different. HISFF's own promotional materials describe the overlap as intentional, built in partnership with the Center for the Arts to create a shared weekend for both events. For an organization managing 130-plus annual productions with volunteer labor, and another running a fundraising festival that supports art scholarships for local kids, sharing a Saturday brings the two events together.
The Weekend, If You're Actually Going
Here's what the overlap means on the ground, block by block:
- Friday, September 25: HISFF opens at the Raven with a kickoff screening block. Individual blocks run $20 general admission, $10 for students, and a full festival pass covering every block is $100.
- Saturday, September 26: The day splits geographically. Center Street hosts the Festival of the Arts from artist booths and live music. A few minutes' walk away at the Raven, Billy Ray signs books at 11 a.m., followed by afternoon and evening screening blocks. The Raven's own site notes that Taste of Tea, the Japanese restaurant near downtown, is offering 20 percent off dine-in and takeout for festival-goers all weekend, which is worth knowing if you're trying to eat between screenings without a wait.
- Sunday, September 27: HISFF closes with its final screening blocks at the Raven, wrapping the festival's fifth year.
If your rotation for that Saturday has historically been Plaza in the morning, home by early afternoon, this is the year to budget for both stops. The two events sit close enough downtown that you can walk from artist booths to a matinee screening without moving your car.
What This Actually Tells You About Living Here
The easy version of this story is a calendar listing: two things are happening the same weekend, here's when and where. The more useful version is what the scheduling decision itself reveals. Healdsburg's cultural life doesn't run through a single city department coordinating a master calendar. It runs through independent nonprofits, a theater board that bought its own building, a film festival that built a global submission pipeline out of a converted movie house, an arts nonprofit whose festival moved from its traditional location. When two of those groups coordinate their dates, it's a small but real signal that the people running this town's cultural infrastructure are talking to each other and adjusting, year over year, based on what actually works.
That's the kind of thing you only notice if you've been paying attention to Healdsburg for more than one September. It's also the kind of thing that makes living here different from visiting here. Visitors get the polished version: charming plaza, wine country backdrop, a festival poster. Residents get to watch the seams, the year the location changes, the year two boards coordinate their calendars, the year a screenwriter shows up to sign books at a theater that almost closed for good twenty-five years ago.
If you're already home in Healdsburg this weekend, that's the version worth showing up for.
The Borrall Hodes Team has spent nearly two decades tracking the small shifts that make Sonoma County towns work, the festival dates, the venue histories, the block-by-block changes that never show up on a listing sheet. When you're ready to talk about your own next move in Healdsburg or anywhere else in Wine Country, book an appointment and let's talk it through over coffee.
