For four days each October, a small nonprofit cinema on Missoula's Hip Strip becomes the closest thing Montana has to a festival circuit hub. The Montana Film Festival returns to The Roxy Theater from Thursday, October 22, through Sunday, October 25, 2026, its twelfth edition, with short and feature-length films from across the country and the world screening through the day and into the evening. Many of the films will be followed immediately by a Q&A with the directors.
That access is the point. For the Roxy, the festival is a chance to bring films to Montana that would otherwise never reach the state, and to give local audiences the kind of experience usually reserved for bigger cities. "If you live in Montana, sometimes you don't get a lot of chances like that to see things that you would in the city," John Budge, the festival's director, told KPAX. "This really gives you a chance to come out and be a part of that community."
The festival's origins trace to 2015, when it began at the Roxy as the brainchild of Andrew Rizzo and Aaron Roos, according to the festival's own history. The inaugural edition was built around a deliberately broad idea of Montana film: four days that mixed select titles from the state's past, work currently being made here, and independent films from the wider festival circuit. It featured three home-state premieres. The second edition, which opened on Thursday, October 6, 2016, took innovation and representation as an unofficial theme, a signal that the young festival intended to program with a point of view rather than simply assemble a greatest-hits reel.
Rizzo and Roos were, and remain, Roxy people. A 2018 impact report for the theater lists Roos as technical director and Rizzo as operations director alongside executive director Mike Steinberg, which helps explain why the festival has always felt less like an outside event renting a room and more like an extension of the building's own personality.
That building has a story of its own. The Roxy opened in 1937 as a community theater on what Missoulians call the Hip Strip, and for decades it was the sort of place where people remembered their first date or the first movie they ever saw. A fire destroyed the theater in 1994. It sat dark, then reopened year-round in 2013 as a revitalized arts hub, its original facade intact but missing elements lost to the fire, including the vintage neon marquee and the box office where hundreds once queued. A restoration completed in the years after 2017 brought back the 1937 glamour, including a new historic marquee. Today the Roxy operates as a nonprofit, community-owned theater, one of the few in the country that can say so.
Missoula is not short on film culture. It is home to the International Wildlife Film Festival, which bills itself as the first juried wildlife film festival in the world, and since 2003 the Wilma has hosted the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, the largest film event in the state. What the Montana Film Festival adds is a general-interest, international-minded showcase in a 200-ish-seat house where the person introducing the movie is likely to be the person who runs the projector.
That intimacy is what the Q&As are built on. A director who has just shown a film at a festival in Toronto or Sundance can, a few weeks later, stand in front of a Missoula audience and take questions. For viewers, the exchange runs both ways: filmmakers get to hear from a part of the country that rarely appears on the festival map, and Montanans get to see work that would otherwise require a plane ticket.
The twelfth edition runs Thursday through Sunday, October 22–25, 2026, at the Roxy in downtown Missoula. Screenings run throughout the day and evening, and many are paired with post-film conversations with the directors. Showtimes and the full lineup are posted on the Montana Film Festival's website.