RiverRun International Film Festival

It started as a small festival named for a river it would eventually leave behind. The French Broad runs near Brevard, North Carolina, and that's where Gennaro, Vincent, and Elizabeth D'Onofrio founded RiverRun in 1998 — a few dozen films over three days, the kind of thing that exists on ambition more than infrastructure. By 2003, the festival was struggling.

What saved it was a move. Dale Pollock — then dean of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts — brought RiverRun to Winston-Salem, a city that had spent decades building an arts identity to stand alongside its tobacco and textile past. The fit was deliberate. Winston-Salem needed a film festival to round out what it was becoming; RiverRun needed a city that would take it seriously.

It took root. The festival now runs across downtown venues, including a/perture cinema and the Stevens Center, spreading through the city rather than concentrating in one room. It operates as a nonprofit media arts organization, with a stated mission to use cinema as a vehicle for ideas and perspectives — the kind of institutional language that either means something or doesn't, depending on the programming. Since 2014, RiverRun has held Oscar-qualifying status in the animated short film category, which means the work screened here carries real stakes for the filmmakers who show up.

That's the reason to go: not the prestige of the designation, but what it attracts. Festivals that qualify for awards draw filmmakers who still have something to prove. The shorts programs especially — student work, international submissions, documentaries that haven't found distribution — are where you'll see cinema before it gets explained to you. Show up without a plan and let the schedule decide.