Welcome to the new era of the Traverse City Film Festival, founded and curated by Oscar-winner Michael Moore. 52 great movies in 52 weeks! A year-round festival of powerful, subversive, indie masterpieces made with the belief that cinema can save the world — and that one great movie can change your life.
TCFF 2025
SUMMER SCHEDULE
OUR 20TH ANNIVERSARY!
All films show at 1pm & 7pm unless otherwise noted
FILM GUIDE
OPENING NIGHT FILM!
JULY 15
1pm, 7pm
THE GOLD RUSH
What better way to celebrate our 20th Anniversary of the Traverse City Film Festival than by kicking off TCFF TUESDAYS Summer 2025 Season with a 100th anniversary showing of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 classic, THE GOLD RUSH! You don’t want to miss this digitally restored gem – for which Chaplin wanted to be remembered. Set in the late 1890s Alaskan Gold Rush, this black-and-white masterpiece stars Chaplin (in his famed “Little Tramp” persona) as a prospector who dreams of striking it rich in the Klondike; however, his character soon confronts the grim realities of desperate gold-diggers – and combats them with iconic slapstick like “the dance of the dinner rolls” & boiling his own boot for Thanksgiving dinner. Yet Chaplin does find success, and love, in this silent comedy classic – the most expensive of its era, and the highest-grossing comedy of the silent film genre. We can’t wait to celebrate its 100th birthday – and our 20th – with you!
Silent Film
USA
1h 35m
Director: Charlie Chaplin
Starring: Charlie Chaplin
JULY 22
1pm, 7pm
THE PENGUIN LESSONS
From the director of THE FULL MONTY comes a delightful period film that’s part DEAD POET’S SOCIETY and part MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS. Based on the 2015 memoir of the same name by Tom Michell, THE PENGUIN LESSONS is set in 1970s Argentina, where a British ex-pat (Oscar-nominee Steve Coogan) starts a new job at a boys’ boarding school. The job is a bore until Coogan’s character rescues a penguin from an oil spill — then can’t get rid of him! Once he brings his new pet to class, the kids blossom into rapt students and Coogan’s character undergoes a political awakening as the 1976 military coup explodes around them. THE PENGUIN LESSONS is a sweet, joyful film about how the parochialism of privilege falls apart when life asks us to care for – and about – others in unexpected ways.
Director: Peter Cattaneo
Starring: Steve Coogan
Period Drama
Spain, USA, UK
1h 51m
JULY 29
1pm, 7pm
TROUBLED WATER
@1pm & 7pm
Twenty years ago this week, we launched our beloved, and renowned, Traverse City Film Festival. To celebrate, we’re presenting a double feature of two of Michael Moore’s favorite festival films from our two decades of programming.
At 1pm & 7pm we’ll be showing TROUBLED WATER, the incredible Norwegian drama that opened our 2009 Traverse City Film Festival.
Named Best Film by the Norwegian Film Critics and awarded two of Norway’s prestigious Amanda Awards, TROUBLED WATER is a film about trauma, grief and the lure of redemption, if not the thing itself.
When Jan is released from prison for killing a child, he takes a new name and a job playing the organ at a church. His cover works well — and he even falls in love – but his new life is challenged when Agnes, the mother of the boy he killed, shows up at church.
Drama
Norway
1h 55m
Director: Erik Poppe
JULY 29
4pm
CZECH DREAM @ 4pm
CZECH DREAM was part of the inaugural line-up of our very first Traverse City Film Festival. In CZECH DREAM, filmmakers Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda have made a hilarious & subversive documentary about two guys who decide to see just how desperate their fellow countrymen are to embrace capitalism when they announce the opening of the “Czech Dream Hypermarket” and must confront the 4,000 incensed Czech consumers they’ve lured to an empty field. A withering & dizzying reflection on Western consumption culture – with a wink.
Documentary, Comedy
Czech Republic
1h 30m
Directors: Vít Klusák & Filip Remunda
July 30
(Wednesday)
7pm
INFINITELY POLAR BEAR
This wonderful, sweet & unexpectedly comedic film opened our 2016 TCFF Season. Mark Ruffalo won a Golden Globe for his turn as a bipolar father in this sweet, sensitive and unexpectedly humorous biopic from first-time writer and director Maya Forbes. Her own mentally ill father inspired the film (and its title comes from the way her father once described his bipolar diagnosis on a psychiatric hospital’s intake form). Set in 1970s Boston, Ruffalo’s character, on the heels of a breakdown, is left with their two daughters while his brilliant, long-suffering wife (Zoe Saldaña) pursues an MBA. The film refuses to further stereotypes of what it means to live, and parent, as someone with or proximal to bipolar disorder. Similarly, it refuses to avoid the realities and consequences – embarrassing, frustrating & sometimes scary – that come with the disease. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at 2014’s Sundance Film Festival.
Drama
USA
1h 30m
Director: Maya Forbes
Stars: Mark Ruffalo, Zoe Saldaña, Imogene Wolodarsky
AUGUST 5
1pm, 7pm
ANDY KAUFMAN IS ME
This brilliant doc fresh off its Tribeca debut explores the enigmatic genius of one of comedy’s brightest burning stars – Andy Kaufman. Before dying tragically at age 35, the breakout star from Taxi and Saturday Night Live kept the world off guard with his unique brand of hilarious & unsettling performance-style comedy. Certainly Kaufman’s life has been the subject of numerous TV and film treatments, but this doc from the empathic & immensely talented director Clay Tweel (whose film PRINT THE LEGEND showed at TCFF 2014) is the big swing we’ve all been waiting for – and which you get the sense, through puppetry and funhouse interview backdrops, that Kaufman may have produced himself. This is the doc Kaufman’s family chose to endorse – and appear in – next to comedy greats like Eric André, Carol Kane and David Letterman, who produced alongside Kaufman fan Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Intercut with exclusive personal audio recordings of Kaufman that reveal a heretofore unseen vulnerability to the star, ANDY KAUFMAN IS ME is the most comprehensive portrait of one of comedy’s most complex – and unforgettable – stars.
Director: Clay Tweel
Starring: Andy Kaufman, David Letterman, Carol Kane, Eric André
Documentary
USA
1h 41m
AUGUST 12
1pm, 7pm
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
On this week 80 years ago, Japan accepted the Allies’ surrender terms, just days after the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs that murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens. But in the eight decades since, few American films have explored World War II from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers conscripted to fight it. Clint Eastwood’s LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA is an exception. Eastwood knows how to tell a great “traditional” war story – but in LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA – his 2006 follow-up to FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS – Eastwood presents what NYT film critic A.O. Scott calls “utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights” and also ventures “is hard to think of another war movie that has gone so deeply, so sensitively, into the mind-set of the opposing side.” Set on the brink of the Battle of Iwo Jima, just months before Japan’s surrender, it intimately and humanely explores what Japanese soldiers faced as they prepared for near-certain death at the behest of the Emperor’s refusal to provide any military aid – essentially instructing them to die with honor. Of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers at Iwo Jima, only just over 1,000 survived. This film imagines what it might have been like to face those odds, especially knowing the nuclear holocaust lurking for the soldiers’ families. LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay – and won for Best Sound Editing.
Action, Drama, War
USA
2h 21m
Director: Clint Eastwood
AUGUST 19
SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
Based on the 2021 internationally bestselling novel of the same name, SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE asks us to examine the depths of our complicity in crimes society has camouflaged so well they may appear de rigueur. Set in the mid-1980s in a small Irish town, the film sidles up to a quiet and respected local coal purveyor portrayed with everyday working class anguish and grace by Academy Award winner Cillian Murphy. A father of six girls, Murphy’s character is haunted both by flashes of his traumatic childhood and a growing anxiety gnawing away at him about his maturing girls, for he knows very well what nobody in polite Irish society will dare to say out loud: if one of his daughters should find herself pregnant, there is only one thing to do – send her off to the Magdalene Laundries. During the height of Ireland’s century-plus abortion ban, these “laundries” were in fact prison camps run by the Catholic Church and filled with unwed pregnant women and girls deposited there by their families – and whose babies were adopted out or died. When Murphy’s character is tasked with delivering coal to one such facility and inadvertently witnesses its horrors, he can’t look away, and must decide what “doing the right thing” is worth, and who it serves.
Director: Tim Milan
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Eileen Walsh, Emily Watson
Period Drama
Ireland, Belgium, USA
1h 58m
AUGUST 26
1pm, 7pm
EL CUARTITO
EL CUARTITO is a genius satirical riposte to the Trump-era absurdities and indignities faced by immigrants journeying to the United States. Shot & produced entirely in Puerto Rico (even through a 6.8 earthquake!) by Argentinian director Marcos Carnevale, EL CUARTITO tells the story of five Latino travelers who are detained at a San Juan airport by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – and end up detained in a tiny windowless room (the titular “el cuartito”). No bathroom. No vending machine. Just a framed portrait of Trump and no sense of when, or if, they’ll be released. EL CUARTITO is a comedy – but because of Trump 2.0’s U.S. immigration policy – we can’t call it a farce; however, it’s a brilliant & biting film we can’t wait to watch with you.
Comedy, Drama
Puerto Rico
1h 34m
Director: Marcos Carnevale
SEPTEMBER 2
1pm, 7pm
MIKE’S SURPRISE
Over the decades we’ve been doing TCFF, one of our most popular perennial events is the one no one knows anything about! Not even Trump’s Deep STate! Festival founder and president Michael Moore personally presents “Mike’s Surprise” – it may be overlooked gem, a sneak peak of a brand new movie, a Hollywood director Zooming in or home movies from the 1950s! Who knows! Show up to find out!
SEPTEMBER 9
1pm, 7pm
THE LAST CLASS
This moving & intimate new documentary invites viewers on a journey through the final semester of a UC Berkeley class on economic inequality taught by one of this nation’s great intellectuals, famed economist & former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich. This is not a rote Ted Talk treatment of Reich’s renowned “Wealth & Inequality” class, though THE LAST CLASS has plenty of sweeping hero shots of Reich at home onstage in his Berkeley lecture hall to make you feel as if you’re there. It’s wonderful to see Reich disarm 1,000 students with warmth & humor – then inspire them to fight the sources of income inequality, including cynicism – because as Reich puts it to the students: “Pessimism is fine.” And “Cynicism is not.” The in-class scenes are deftly cut with touching, contemplative sit-down interviews with Reich as he reflects on, as director Elliot Kirschner puts it, “education, service, and confronting the passage of time in an age of dangerous disruption.”
Documentary
USA
1h 11m
Director: Elliot Kirschner
Starring: Robert Reich
SEPTEMBER 16
1pm, 7pm
CANADIAN BACON
Thirty years ago this week, after winning the Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival a few months prior, TCFF Founder & President Michael Moore’s second film, CANADIAN BACON opened in theaters across the U.S.
The film features a powerhouse cast of comedy stars: John Candy, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Nunn, Rip Torn, and Steven Wright. The Cold War is over and the President of the United States (Alan Alda) needs an external enemy in order to keep the American people in fear so he can maintain public support for his bloated military budget — and keep his billionaires buddies pockets’ lined with cash. After casting wildly about for an enemy he can invade, his insane minders in the White House convince him that his one, true enemy is our great friend to the North. Almost overnight, this loose cannon President has stumbled America into a war with Canada.
At the time, Michael called CANADIAN BACON “a work of fiction” – but today, with a proposal being floated that Canada be made the 51st state, even Hollywood is asking if it shouldn’t now be called a documentary. Either way, CANADIAN BACON is a hilarious lampoon of runaway U.S. hawkishness, and possibly the only film to cast maple syrup as nefarious! It is also, tragically, the incomparable John Candy’s last completed film.
Director: Michael Moore
Starring: John Candy, Alan Alda, Rhea Perlman, Bill Nunn, Rip Torn, Steven Wright and Wallace Shawn
Satire, Comedy, Action
USA
1h 31m
SEPTEMBER 23
1pm, 7pm
SPEAK.
This inspiring documentary fresh from this year’s Sundance Film Festival introduces you to our nation’s best orators – who happen to be high school students. SPEAK is shot and produced like a classic sports drama (Variety likens it to a doc version of BEND IT LIKE BEKHAM or A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN), as seen through the eyes of five teenaged American finalists in the National Speech and Debate Association Grand National Tournament. The film is carried by its charismatic and layered young competitors, and doesn’t shy away from documenting their devastations along with their wins. SPEAK will make you dare to hope for the future our children are barrelling towards and creating, and reveals the grit, passion and endurance it takes to not just talk about the world you envision – but to SPEAK it into being.
Documentary
USA
1h 44m
Directors: Jennifer Tiexiera & Guy Mossman
SEPTEMBER 30
1pm, 7pm
SUNSET BLVD.
Join us for the 75th Anniversary 4k Restoration of Billy Wilder’s classic 1950 indictment of Hollywood and celebrity culture! In this film noir favorite, Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a debt-collector-dodging screenwriter fatefully hired by former silent screen star, Norma Desmond (real-life silent era star Gloria Swanson) to pen her comeback film. Discarded by Hollywood once “talkies” took over, Norma lives alone with her former director, now her masterfully enabling butler, in a world padded by delusion and grandeur. Her house – a ramshackle mansion on Sunset Blvd. – is itself a silent actor in this film, Norma’s own expensive sarcophagus into which she fatefully draws Joe. As the money he’s making off her numbs the call of Joe’s own artistic desires, he tries escaping – and must confront a very different kind of comeback Norma threatens to make. SUNSET BOULEVARD won 3 Academy Awards at the 1951 Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Billy Wilder) and Best Actress (Gloria Swanson).
Director: Billy Wilder
Drama, Film Noir
USA
1h 50m
2024 Archive
2023 Archive
TICKETS
| Single: | $10 |
| Student: | $6 |
| Season Pass (14 films) |
$69 |
| Student Season Pass (14 films) |
$49 |
VENUE
State theatre
Traverse City, MI
(231) 600-7272
SPONSORS
