Oak Cliff Film Society

The Oak Cliff Film Festival was established in 2012 as a regional film festival in the historically underserved neighborhood of Oak Cliff. Over the last 10 years, the festival has become a significant cultural event, coupling its notable line-ups of diverse and archival films and performances with educational programming and meet and greets with filmmakers.

The festival brings in hundreds of filmmakers, many local musical acts, and dozens of films that otherwise would not screen in Dallas. Workshop and panel discussions are a key component of our program, enabling local and beginner filmmakers to learn techniques and strategies for funding films, producing films with limited budgets, applying filmmaking technique and craft to their work, and other educational topics that span the complex roles that filmmakers play. Another major component of OCFF is our series of meet and greet sessions for festival and workshop attendees to interact socially with filmmakers. We also offer several juried prizes for films submitted to the festival--awards that bring prestige to local and state filmmakers and help launch careers.

The Oak Cliff Film Festival is a neighborhood-wide event with its headquarters at the historic Texas Theatre and extending to diverse cultural pockets of the area at venues such as the Kessler Theater, the Bishop Arts Theatre Center, the Oak Cliff Cultural Center, Wild Detectives, Turner House and Top Ten Records. Because of the passionate and diverse community support that we receive, OCFF continues to succeed as a hyper-local event.

The collaboration of the Oak Cliff Film Festival and the neighborhood we call home speaks to our shared desire to foster a symbiotically beneficial relationship between the festival and its community, working diligently to promote Oak Cliff as a noteworthy center for the arts, and building on the economic infrastructure of community cooperation and local business investment that a cultural economy depends on.

Our Needs

Each year, the Oak Cliff Film Festival offers free filmmaking workshops to the community at large as a way to raise the cultural currency of both Oak Cliff and the greater Dallas area in the film industry nationwide, and to promote film as a vocation for Dallas residents. We require funding for our $7,500 budget to operate these workshops and bring in the experts that lead them.

In order to bring the very best acclaimed and diverse programming, we require funds for the screening and performance fees that allow us to show these works and pay the artists. These fees are projected to cost $8,000+ in 2024.

Part of our mission is to bolster the Oak Cliff neighborhood and its historic venues. In order to do that, the festival pays each venue that participates a venue fee. Venue fees alone are projected to total $15,000 next year, as we will have events and screenings at no fewer than 4 venues in Oak Cliff.