For twelve years, the Charlottetown Film Festival was a fixture of the Island's cultural calendar — a few days of screenings, mostly at the City Cinema on King Street, with a soft spot for work made close to home. In October 2026, that festival returns under a new name and a far bigger tent. ANCHOR Fest runs October 14 to 18 across downtown Charlottetown, and it is no longer just about movies.
The rebrand was announced in October 2025, when organizers confirmed that the festival's twelfth edition would be its last under the old banner. The new event folds television, comedy, music and podcasts into a single five-day program, run by a newly founded non-profit called the Anchor Motion Picture Alliance (AMPA). The inspiration, organizers said, came from multi-arts gatherings like South by Southwest in Austin, Texas — festivals that treat film, music and comedy as one continuous conversation rather than separate silos.
That reference is not incidental. Jenna MacMillan, the festival's director, has said her thinking was shaped by attending SXSW herself. MacMillan is a Charlottetown filmmaker with an unusually deep résumé in the city's screen culture: a former child actress who once played Anne of Green Gables in a tourism campaign, she studied film at Ryerson University, spent a decade working mostly in Toronto because PEI had little industry to come home to, and kept circling back — helping build a film training program at Holland College, directing shorts and music videos for artists like Rose Cousins and Kinley Dowling, and producing features including Adam Perry's A Small Fortune and Jeremy Larter's Who's Yer Father?. Her own feature directorial debut, The Snake, made history in 2026 as the first PEI film to screen at SXSW, where it won a Special Jury Award for Performance.
Under MacMillan, the festival's ambitions grew. "Audiences in Atlantic Canada are hungry for innovative, cutting-edge, and comedic content," she said when the rebrand was announced. "We've been inspired by festivals from all over the world, from Galway to SXSW, to bring fresh, new ideas to our audiences. We hope that Anchor can expand its scope, and expand its audiences."
The expanded scope is visible throughout the 2026 lineup. The film program, split between City Cinema and Tivoli Cinema, leans into what organizers call "a bold and comedic lens." Opening night on October 14 brings Ron Murphy's Back in Black, a macabre small-town comedy starring Christopher Walken as a foul-mouthed mortician, with Murphy in attendance for a post-screening Q&A. The festival also lands Andrew Haigh's period drama A Long Winter and a slate of Canadian and international features. Island filmmakers get a prominent platform: PEI premieres of MacMillan's The Snake and Michael Gabriele's Unholy Night, the world premiere of Eliza Knockwood's Rite of Passage, and short films from a long list of local directors including Jeremy Thornhill, Trilby Jeeves, Vanessa Tignanelli, Hélène Lebon, Justin Rix, Bailey Dockendorff, Eric Cerisano and Dawn Johnson.
Music programming reaches well beyond the Island. Concerts are set for Trailside Music Hall, the Charlottetown Beer Garden and Beaconsfield Carriage House, and the bill mixes national touring acts with Atlantic Canada's underground. Toronto's confrontational techno-industrial provocateurs Slash Need — who became a cult fascination after a widely circulated 2023 Toronto Pride performance drew 2.3 million views and at least one commenter branding them "nasty, filthy perverts" — share the lineup with Nova Scotia punk mainstays Heavenly Blue, Penny & the Pits (the new project from Motherhood's Penelope Stevens), Captains of Everything (Andy Maize and Aaron Comeau of Skydiggers), Nick Doneff, Sam O, Space Bud, UNCLE, Bilge, Dear Blossom, Cathedral Grove and Green Eyes Witch Hands, who will play an Evil Twin album release show. One punk-rock set at Beaconsfield Carriage House is all-ages and pay-what-you-can.
Comedy gets its own venues and its own logic. The Arts Guild and The Comedy Cave, downstairs at The Factory, host shows spotlighting PEI's rising stand-ups alongside national names who move between stand-up, podcasting and film. Highlights include The Big 3 LIVE with Nathan Hare, Sam Burns and Ben Stager, and Matt Wright's live show featuring the cast of The Snake. A particular local favorite gets a bigger stage: Rat Tales Comedy Night, normally a Monday-night weekly at Baba's Lounge, becomes a one-off 60-minute theatre show on October 15, hosted by Britt Campbell, recorded so the comics can use the footage to book work beyond PEI. It remains pay-what-you-can, in keeping with its roots. Campbell follows it with a 9 p.m. trial run of a full comedy hour, sharpening the material ahead of recording an album.
The conference strand rounds out the week with panels, workshops and networking events designed to connect emerging and established creators with industry professionals — a continuation of the Film Forum the festival introduced in its pre-rebrand years.
There is a longer history underneath all this. The Charlottetown Film Festival launched in October 2015, founded by the Charlottetown Film Society with a mission to build film culture on the Island, holding its inaugural screenings at City Cinema. It grew steadily, adding an industry forum and, in 2017, an unusual cultural exchange with the Screenplay Film Festival in Shetland, Scotland — each event sending a program of local short films to be shown at the other. By its ninth year it was describing itself as "created by filmmakers for filmmakers," with ten screenings and nine industry panels packed into three days. AMPA now extends that advocacy work year-round, serving as a representative body for PEI producers and professionals in film, television and digital media, with a board that includes Sharlene Kelly as president and figures like MacMillan, Bill Lundy and Jeremy Larter among its members.
What that means for a visitor in October is a festival you can wander through. Programming is spread across downtown venues rather than confined to a single building, and individual events are ticketed separately, so there is no single pass required to sample it. You can catch a Walken comedy at City Cinema, walk to a punk show at Beaconsfield, and end the night at a comedy taping at The Guild — all within a few blocks of one another.
Twelve years in, the festival that once fit inside one cinema has become something closer to a small city-wide takeover. The name is new. The anchor, organizers seem to be saying, was always the place itself.