Hell's Half Mile Film & Music Festival

“In 2006, we were a bunch of friends at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor watching a great band from San Diego saying, ‘Why do we have to drive here or to Detroit for things like this? We should do something that brings the bands to us.’ Our initial idea was for a festival that included EVERYTHING: performing arts, culinary arts, theater, music, and film.

Then a friend of ours, who was working for an arts organization at the time, said, ‘Why don't you just do one thing and do it right?’

And I was like, ‘How about we do two things that are sort of good?’

We were very into film and music, so we took those two passions and ran with them. We had gone to the film festivals in Traverse City and East Lansing that summer and thought, ‘We can do our version of this.’ We started talking to film festival organizers who helped us out and gave us the insight we needed to get started, and the Hell's Half Mile Film & Music Festival was born. We worked with the former Bay Arts Council, partnering with them for about 10 years, and then started our own nonprofit.

In 2015, we began going to Art House Convergence, Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and Tribeca Film Festival, along with all the other big regional festivals like the one in Cleveland.

Because of that, we've made this huge network of film festival organizers and that’s led so many different people from the industry to come to our festival.

Filmmakers submit their films to get into our festival through a website called Film Freeway. Every time our call for submissions is open, out of the thousands of film festivals represented there, filmmakers review us as one of the top 100 festivals to submit their films to.

Something amazing this year is that Hell’s Half Mile was named one of the 25 coolest film festivals in the WORLD by MovieMaker Magazine. It’s a cool thing to be on this list: it means a lot to filmmakers and it definitely means a lot to us as organizers of the festival.

But I hope it also means a lot to our community as well. Bay City is being recognized for something in a big way. People from the industry are telling the entire world, ‘You have to go to this festival in Bay City.’

This festival wasn't something meant to be a tourist attraction to get people from Detroit to think we’re cool: we created it for our community.

Now, do we want people from Detroit or other places to come? Absolutely! And that's a great thing about a lot of events that happen in Bay City: we build them for ourselves while inviting those who don’t live here to enjoy them, too.

Hell’s Half Mile is about film and music, but it’s also about people who live here or live elsewhere, gathering and enjoying our community together.”

– Alan LaFave, Festival Director and Founding Board President, Hell's Half Mile Film & Music Festival.

HHM is September 21st through the 24th, right here in Downtown Bay City!