# Montclair Film Festival Sets Its October Return as the 15th Edition Approaches 2026-09-07 · The Clairidge · Montclair, New Jersey · Event The lineup is still under wraps, but the dates are set, the ticket calendar is in place, and Montclair Film is preparing to turn the town into a ten-day movie destination once again. The lineup is still under wraps, but the dates are set, the ticket calendar is in place, and Montclair Film is preparing to turn the town into a ten-day movie destination once again. --- The Montclair Film Festival returns Oct. 16 through Oct. 25, and the first useful thing to know about the 2026 edition is that the festival has not shown its hand yet. The full lineup is scheduled to be announced Sept. 25, member presales run Sept. 28 through Sept. 30, and general ticket sales begin Oct. 1. That makes this a genuine advance rather than a lineup breakdown: the dates are on the calendar, the venues are active, and the next three weeks will determine what the 15th annual festival actually looks like. Montclair Film describes the event as a mix of international and independent cinema, panel discussions, special guest appearances, and community events spread across its own theaters and partner locations throughout town. The organization’s core venues include The Clairidge at 486 Bloomfield Avenue, The Bellevue at 260 Bellevue Avenue, and Cinema505 at 505 Bloomfield Avenue. The festival structure matters because Montclair does not operate like a single-building film event. For ten days, screenings and conversations spill across multiple rooms and make the town itself part of the experience. This year also carries an anniversary weight. The 2026 festival is the 15th edition, and Montclair Film has already begun framing the milestone around both what it has built and what comes next. Visual artist and professor Adama Delphine Fawundu created this year’s festival campaign artwork around ideas of courage, flourishing, rootedness, and expansion, while Volvo Car USA has signed on as title sponsor. The branding is celebratory, but the stronger proof of scale is what the festival has become in practice. Last year’s festival drew more than 23,000 attendees across ten days and presented more than 140 films, events, and conversations with the help of more than 200 volunteers. Those numbers put the event well beyond the category of a small local film weekend. Montclair has become one of New Jersey’s reliable annual meeting points for independent cinema, documentary work, industry conversation, and the increasingly important space between theatrical exhibition and community cultural programming. That balance is what makes the lineup announcement worth waiting for. The festival accepts narrative features, documentary features, world cinema, shorts, New Jersey films, student work, all-ages programming, and episodic projects. A Montclair schedule can therefore move from a major awards-season title to a small documentary, a filmmaker conversation, a local project, or a room full of people encountering something they had not planned to see when the day began. The 15th Annual Montclair Film Festival runs Friday, Oct. 16 through Sunday, Oct. 25. The full lineup is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 25. Montclair Film members receive early ticket access beginning Monday, Sept. 28, with the member presale continuing through Sept. 30. Tickets go on sale to the general public Thursday, Oct. 1. Festival screenings and events will be hosted across Montclair Film’s cinema venues and additional partner locations. Because the schedule has not yet been released, individual titles, guests, screening times, ticket prices, and venue assignments should be treated as forthcoming rather than assumed from prior years. The temptation with a film festival is to wait for the recognizable names before deciding whether it matters. Montclair has reached the point where the institution itself is part of the story. A decade and a half of programming has created an audience willing to move through town from movie to conversation to the next movie, which means the festival can function as both showcase and discovery engine. The lineup will tell us what the 2026 edition wants to say. For now, the useful thing is to circle the dates and watch Sept. 25. Once the titles arrive, the countdown changes from abstract to practical: what to see, what to skip, which conversations matter, and which room may contain the film nobody knew to look for yet. Event Details What15th Annual Montclair Film FestivalWhenFriday, Oct. 16 through Sunday, Oct. 25, 2026WhereThe Clairidge, The Bellevue, Cinema505 and partner locations throughout MontclairTicketsLineup announcement Sept. 25; member presale Sept. 28–30; general sale Oct. 1AlsoIndividual titles, guests, times and prices forthcoming with the lineup SOURCE NOTES • Montclair Film — MFF 2026 festival page --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.