What is the Phoenix Film Festival?
Drive north on Scottsdale Road, cross the Loop 101, and the multiplex on your left at Mayo Boulevard is Harkins Scottsdale 101. It is in Phoenix. The city line runs a few hundred yards east, which is why Arizona’s largest film festival carries Phoenix’s name, is listed by Scottsdale’s tourism bureau, and feels like a North Scottsdale event to everyone who attends it.
The Phoenix Film Festival began in 2001 as a three-day showcase organized by local filmmakers, among them Chris LaMont, who hoped for 500 people and got nearly 3,000. It is now an eleven-day festival each April run by the nonprofit Phoenix Film Foundation: more than 250 features, documentaries and shorts on all seven screens of the one theater, a party pavilion and ticket center in the parking lot, filmmaker panels, student workshops, a Kids Day and a Film Prom. Attendance in 2026 was more than 15,000; a record 23,000 was reported in 2013. Jason Carney, a volunteer who worked his way up, has run it since 2005 and was named CEO in 2025.
Running inside it is the International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, founded in 2005 as a separate October event and folded into the April festival in the early 2010s with its own competition and awards, so a single pass covers both. The 2026 edition ran April 9–19; the 27th, in 2027, is April 1–11. Single tickets were $19 in 2026 and passes ran from $50 to $350. For a visitor it is the one thing on the April calendar that happens indoors in the dark, which by the second week of the month is a selling point.
How to do it
Buy a pass in March. Tickets go on sale about a month before opening night. The $19 single ticket is fine for one film; the Super Flex Pass ($130 in 2026) is the right buy for anyone planning a weekend, and the full Festival Pass ($225) pays off at twelve films. VIP and Platinum add the parties, which are good parties but not $100 better. The opening and closing galas sell out first and are the least necessary screenings of the festival, because those films have distributors and will be in this same theater within weeks.
Program for discovery. The World Cinema and documentary competitions, the Arizona Shorts block and the horror features are where the festival earns its keep; most of them have the filmmaker in the room for a Q&A. Short-film blocks are ninety minutes and a safe bet when nothing else fits. Check the schedule for the sports documentaries and the throwback screenings, which are the festival’s idea of a crowd-pleaser.
Logistics. Everything is in one building, so there is no shuttle, no second venue and no missed connection. From Scottsdale take Scottsdale Road north to Mayo rather than the 101, which stacks up at the Princess Drive and Hayden exits on weekend evenings; from Old Town it is about 25 minutes. The Harkins lot is free, but the side nearest the pavilion fills by early evening, and the lots at Desert Ridge Marketplace across Mayo are the overflow. Between screenings, Desert Ridge has dozens of restaurants within a ten-minute walk, and High Street a mile west is the quieter option. If you are coming from a hotel, the JW Marriott Desert Ridge is five minutes away.
Bring a sweater. April outside is 85 and climbing; the Harkins auditoriums are kept cold for eleven days of back-to-back shows. Kids Day, on a festival Saturday, is programming aimed at families and the one morning the lobby is full of children.
How a filmmakers’ festival ended up at a suburban multiplex
Phoenix had tried film festivals before 2001 and, in Carney’s words, “nothing ever stuck.” What stuck this time was that the founders were working filmmakers who wanted a festival built for other filmmakers: a competitive program, cash and in-kind awards, and a schedule designed so visiting directors could see each other’s work. MovieMaker magazine has repeatedly put it on its lists of the coolest festivals and the best for first-time filmmakers, and the Foundation has grown around it a film society, a student festival, a summer camp, the Peoria Film Fest and the horror festival.
The venue is the other half of the story. The Phoenix Film Foundation’s own accounts say the festival moved from a long downtown residency to Harkins Scottsdale 101 in 2014, but film-press coverage has it centered on the theater by 2011 and the 2013 edition was announced there; the exact year of the permanent move is murky, and the festival’s offices are now in the same building’s address. What the theater gave it was seven screens under one roof, a parking lot big enough for a tent city, and a location on the Loop 101 that is twenty-five minutes from Old Town Scottsdale, Desert Ridge, Paradise Valley and the north Phoenix suburbs at once. Few festivals of this size run in a single building; it is the reason a pass-holder here can see five films a day and the reason the lobby, by the second weekend, works like a clubhouse.
The Scottsdale question
Scottsdale’s own festival, the Scottsdale International Film Festival, began the same year, 2001, with eleven films and a thesis about world cinema, and remains a curated November program at Harkins Shea. The two do not compete. One is a curator’s shortlist of foreign award-winners; the other is a competitive marketplace for independent American film that happens to sit on Scottsdale’s doorstep and draws much of its audience from the city. That Scottsdale gets the benefit of the largest film festival in the state without hosting it is the kind of arrangement the Loop 101 corridor specializes in. Buy the pass, see the shorts, and skip the galas.