Ben Warner Is Sparking SoCal Adventure Culture

I’ve known Ben Warner for a long time. Way back in the day, we both worked at Powder magazine, and we’ve continued to live pretty close to each other here in Southern California over the years. Ben has done some really cool things since he left Powder — he was with the Sierra Club for a while, started a couple of magazines. A few years ago he told me he was starting a film festival, and I was like, wait, what, how are you going to do that? But man, did he do it. It was a completely bootstrapped operation — his wife and kids involved, a lot of volunteers, held in Laguna Beach. And now, in 2025, it’s about to have its seventh iteration. It’s expanded quite a bit. It’s no longer just the Coast Film Festival — it’s now the Coast Film and Music Festival, and this year his musical guest is Jack Johnson. Once again, I was like, wait, what, Ben, what are you doing? It’s been so cool to see this thing go from zero to becoming a place where adventurous people from all over Southern California come to hear tunes, see art, and watch really incredible films. I’m Stephen Casimiro. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Ben about starting a film festival, keeping it going, and where it’s going from here as much as I did.

With me today, Mr. Ben Warner, founder and co-founder of the Coast Film Festival. The name has changed. Ben, welcome. What’s the proper name of the festival today?

Hey, Steve. Thank you for having me. The real name is the Coast Film and Music Festival, and we’re owned and operated by the Coast Film Foundation, which is a new addition, about two years old now. It’s a mouthful. As we’re in our seventh year, people are going back to “Coast Film Festival” in many cases, depending who we’re speaking with — a filmmaker or a musician. It’s interesting.

That’s cool, though, that they’re adopting their own shorthand — that it’s becoming well known enough that that’s just how they refer to it.

I start to refer to it as Coast, because that’s so much easier. There’s room for interpretation from a lot of angles, and that’s a good description of what we’re creating. It’s very inclusive. But adding music, which we added to the name three years in, we realized we always had live music as part of the festival, and that music was part of filmmaking — really key to making good stories work on film. So why not add music?

And this year — we’re recording about a month out from the 2025 festival — you scored a pretty big get for your musical guest. Who is it?

It’s Jack Johnson and the Moonshine Conspiracy. They’re playing two nights, the second weekend of the festival, November 8th and 9th. There’s a long story behind that, Steve. It’s taken us years to get to this point, and part of that has been getting access to the Irvine Bowl, which is part of the Festival of the Arts here in Laguna Beach but rarely used for live music. So there’s been a lot of work behind the scenes for many years to get to the point where we can announce that Jack Johnson and his friends are coming to play.

Before we get too deep, I want to provide some context. I’ve known Ben for 30 years, somewhere around there. We worked together at Powder magazine way back in the day. Not quite neighbors, but close, and our paths have crisscrossed many times over the years. Ben is one of the most enthusiastic and optimistic people I’ve ever known. I was probably the only one who called you this, but at Powder, my nickname for Ben was Glow Worm, because he was always bouncing with energy. One of my favorite stories — Powder used to have these parties at the trade shows in Salt Lake City. There was a club, DV8, I think.

We had them. Wherever we were, we were asked back. We had to DV8.

Recalculating. I don’t drink, so my evenings would end relatively early. And our publisher at the time — I don’t know that Bernie drank, but it was the morning after the Powder party, and we’re sitting having breakfast in this old-lady, doily hotel restaurant. And Ben comes rolling in, just so full of energy — hey guys, I’m so hungover, I had such a rough night, I feel just horrible. And he had more energy hung over than I do on my best day.

That was part of my college degree experience, probably.

You went to school in New York, right?

St. Lawrence University, top of the state, next to Canada. A very social school. There wasn’t much to do up there.

I’ve known so many ski bums who went to St. Lawrence.

We had a great ski team, and it was funny, because our ski area was Lake Placid, about a two-hour drive. It wasn’t right there — you had to work hard to be on the ski team. And a lot of that driving was done hungover.

So Ben and I have known each other a long time. I know you worked with Sierra magazine for a while. You’ve had a lot of twists and turns to your career, but always rooted in the outdoors. For context, we’re both in South Orange County, California. I’m guessing you moved there to work at Powder. I moved there to work — I was living in Vermont, not far from Lake Placid actually, when I got the job at Powder. I’ve been in California since, oh Jesus, almost 40 years, since 1987. We both ended up staying, even though we’re super passionate skiers who made the trip up to Mammoth quite a bit. Ben’s in Laguna Beach, and I’m down in Dana Point. When I first heard about the festival, I was like, this is so cool to have an adventure-related film festival in Southern California — and, oh my God, what are you doing, are you insane? So step back a little for the 30,000-foot view: how did you get the idea, and how did you get the chutzpah to move forward?

Good question. A few angles to touch on. You and I are both from the East Coast, and we traveled West to end up in Southern California, working for the best ski magazine at the time. It took me three years to get that job at Powder. I grew up reading Powder. To back up — I grew up in a farmhouse on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut, with a ski area a mile away. I call it a babysitter mountain — my mom would drop me off in the morning and pick me up in the evening, because a ski pass cost less than a babysitter. So I got to ski a lot, and then worked there as a ski instructor, a lifty, a snowmaker. My love for skiing started young, and my love for Powder — I’d cut out my magazines and make collages all over my room.

I went to college to study English lit and econ, really destined to maybe work as a banker in New York. Then I decided to take a year off and go to Colorado to ski and live the lifestyle I’d always dreamt of. I had to work so many different jobs to make it work — a lifty, a mountain host, working in a ski shop in Vail — and one season became a second season. I’ll never forget meeting Tim Reed, the ad director of Powder, at Pazzo’s Pizza in Vail. It dawned on me: that’s the job I want. Tim gave me his business card, we stayed in touch, and after that I called Tim all the time. Ultimately it was, hey, you need more industry experience. So I moved to Boulder and worked at Spyder, got my industry experience, kept calling Tim, and ultimately got the job. That’s how I got to Southern California.

I had no real knowledge of Southern California. I’d read Surfer a little as a kid. But all of a sudden I realized where I was — this incredible mecca for outdoor experiences. You could live at the beach and wear flip-flops every day, but still go ski world-class areas. Mammoth is my local hill — a six-hour drive, or you fly to Salt Lake. And ultimately this became my place. While working in the ski industry, living at the beach, learning to surf, getting into mountain biking and trail riding, I wasn’t any longer just a mountain guy living at the beach. I just loved the outdoors. I wasn’t defined by “I’m a skier” or “I’m a snowboarder.” Working at Powder, among all the other magazines, there was a clear definition — it was very tribal and often territorial, working in the same building with so many different people. I’d go to Outdoor Retailer and other mountain-sports trade shows, then come back to Laguna Beach and hang out with my friends who worked at Quiksilver and Billabong. They didn’t go to OR — they went to the surf shows. And I realized we all love the outdoor experiences as much as the other, and we actually seek what the other does. I wish I could surf better; they wish they could ski better. It became an opportunity to create an event that brought us all together — not a ski movie, not a mountain bike movie, not a surf movie, but a collective of films and stories that brought us all together for our love of adventure and the outdoors. That’s how I came up with the idea of the Coast Film and Music Festival — to bring us all together, from the mountains to the sea, using the power of story.

So 2025 is the seventh festival. How long had the idea percolated before you decided to do it, and how long until you did? And in there — I know your background; aside from Club DV8, not a lot of event stuff, certainly not bootstrapped, which I know is very much a family operation, you and your wife and kids. So what was that process like?

Being in the advertising sales business, starting in the magazine world back in the ’90s, I was basically selling smoke and mirrors. In the early days it was hard to quantify return on investment. That industry changed so much, and as a result I’ve been laid off several times and had to reinvent myself. I worked for quite a few publishing companies. I started Hobby Farms magazine, for example.

I remember that. I was like, Hobby Farm? What is Hobby Farm?

Right after 9/11. It’s a classic Green Acres concept, but it was really well-timed by that publisher. They hired me to make it happen, and I was cold-calling companies I didn’t know, like John Deere, pitching this idea that people were moving to the country — hedge fund managers pulling a $500,000 salary, buying these fancy farms. I had a variety of experiences working in different industries, realizing there was a lot of opportunity in building community, as long as you believed in it and were passionate about it. After Hobby Farms, I started Laguna Beach Magazine with a similar concept — a magazine that reflected the culture and values of Laguna Beach. It worked really well, and I created many events as an adjunct to it. At the same time, just for fun, I’d host a Warren Miller or TGR movie at the White House bar, in association with Laguna Beach Magazine, and it would sell out. So I’d already had relationships with filmmakers like Teton Gravity Research and Warren Miller and a bunch of bike-film folks. Then I worked at the Sierra Club running Sierra magazine. I worked with Steve Hawk there, and it was a fantastic experience learning about environmental journalism and the power of story — the need for storytelling to inform and inspire an audience to lean into something important to them. And I was laid off from Sierra, and ultimately it was like, gosh, this is the time. All these relationships with film, my experience in Laguna Beach — let’s start it. It took a couple of years to build the business plan. Then I reached out to someone I’d known, Enoch Harris, who had a strong background in the surf industry and lifestyle marketing, which I knew I didn’t have. I was the mountain person, and he’s the ocean guy. We came together and started this business. So here we are, working on our seventh edition of the Coast Film and Music Festival.

I didn’t know that about you doing TGR films at the White House. Before I ask you to dive into the structure and philosophy — could you talk a little about the adventure culture in Southern California? There are 25, 30 million people here, and as you did, I found things very hermetic. I surfed with the guys from Surfer, but there was still a cultural bubble around the sports. And people just don’t think about Southern California as an adventurous place, yet the things we have access to here are nearly as good as anywhere. Not just the diving and free diving and surfing on the coast, but we can mountain bike and trail run 360 days a year. I’ve always felt people just don’t understand how good it is here, and it’s so diffuse, because Southern California is diffuse. The festival is much more than adventure stuff, but that’s core. So how do you see this huge market of adventurous people, and how does Coast become a place for them to come, where, other than an REI, we don’t have many places?

I remember we talked about this over coffee many years ago. The film festival, to me, uses Laguna Beach as the playground and the filter. We have hills that go to the sea — you could call them mountains — and seven miles of coastline, a population of 22,000, six million tourists a year. It’s a world-class destination, but most importantly it has an incredible history of art and activism, and we’re surrounded by protected land and water. So we’re in a unique circumstance amidst the largest urban sprawl in North America — think about the amount of pavement from L.A. to San Diego, and how it keeps growing. We’re this incredible flower, a representation of the way it was and the way it should be eternally. The community is really people who love the outdoors, love art, and love story. What you do and how you participate in the outdoors is up to you. We show about 90 films, covering a wide range — from cycling to butterfly watching to mountaineering to surfing. That’s what makes it magic. We’re not a surf film festival, not an environmental film festival. The intention is to be as inclusive as possible. Our tagline is “come curiously inspired,” which is open, and ultimately a challenge to people.

In Southern California, we have an opportunity to become a lightning rod for outdoor enthusiasts to come together as a community. Like REI, maybe, because they have a wide variety of product for different sports, we’re a festival that draws a wide range of people with a common passion for nature and story. It doesn’t matter what you do; it matters that you do it and get outside. And then there’s that accountability — if you love it, you need to stand up and fight for it, because it’s always being encroached upon. We have a responsibility for future generations to lean in and protect what we love.

I appreciate that, and I particularly appreciate your description of Laguna, because I lived there for many years, until my wife and I wanted to buy a house and couldn’t find anything we liked that we could afford, so we ended up just south. But it really is a gem — an artist community going back to the late 1800s, early 1900s. I post a lot on my Instagram from the Laguna Art Museum. I wouldn’t call them mountains, but you’ve got 800, 900 feet of vertical, and you go for a ride up and down. A friend of ours, Sean Smith, who came to Surfer Publications way back and is currently running the Outdoor Retailer trade show, moved to Southern California from Florida. He’s like, yeah, I love hill riding, I ride hills all the time. We went for our first mountain bike ride with Sean, and he’s like, oh my God, now I know what hills are like. So it’s a beautiful setting, and I think the festival is really well positioned for how the outdoor culture has changed. When you and I were at Powder, it was an unapologetically elitist publication — wonderful for our positioning, but not inclusive at all. The outdoor industry has struggled more than the culture to become more open to people. And what you’re doing with Coast is very inclusive, very diverse. If you love the outdoors, you’re going to love it. So tell me about your philosophy of picking films. You personally are looking at hundreds of films a year to get to 90. What’s that process like, and what are you looking for? Is there a common thread?

We had almost 500 submissions this year. We’ve built a small team that shares the responsibility of watching films and building short lists. And Steve, it’s so fun. It’s like an Easter egg hunt — there are so many incredible stories out there. Many submitted films aren’t necessarily a great fit; they’re filmmakers just looking for an opportunity to be seen. The film festival world is big — there’s a festival in every city, if not the world — and there are a lot of filmmakers, because filmmaking has been democratized. You can make a movie with your phone, the software’s getting easier. So the pool of filmmakers is growing too. We feel a responsibility to identify great stories, not necessarily famous filmmakers. We take the time to look at all the films submitted, and we also seek out films through other channels. I spend a lot of time on Instagram watching and stalking filmmakers I admire. Our formula is to seek the best and most relatable content, and to have a mix — mountain films, ocean films, environmental films. As we go through them, we’re like, oh man, this one’s insane, this is going to be a headliner for one of our theater nights; this is a short film that will fit into a block. We have different venues now. At one time, Steve, we were the film festival that didn’t have a working public movie theater in town.

I know that — I was talking about that on my Instagram. There was this classic movie theater in Laguna that was dead for years, but now isn’t. And one of your major partners is Rivian. So tell us about that.

We were the film festival that didn’t have a theater, so we had to create theaters — which is maybe a reference to the optimism, and a little bit of absurdity, that I had growing up, always trying new ideas. The timing was such that COVID hit in 2020 — we started in 2019, so COVID was our second year. Again, no theaters. We’d planned to have theaters and then couldn’t use the spaces. But the ranch has a golf course and staff they had to employ, and all their corporate events were canceled, so we came together and showed films on the first fairway at the ranch, outdoors. That became one of our venues. Then we realized they didn’t have enough space for our future events, and at that time we met Rivian. Rivian was a sponsor that year, and we began building a relationship. Hey, by the way, our CEO just bought the South Coast Theater, and it’s going to reopen in two years — wouldn’t that be a great alliance? It took a few years of coordinating, but when they brought the Rivian South Coast Theatre online, in 2023, we already had a relationship in place. Our role is to curate adventure films twice a week, free to the public — Thursdays and Saturdays since they opened. That was an incredible opportunity to align with this brand-new theater. Then we have the Festival of the Arts, this incredible outdoor art venue used primarily for the summer Festival of the Arts but shuttered the rest of the year. So why not turn it into a multiplex? We did, and adding the Irvine Bowl this year — part of that space — has always been a vision, and now we can do it.

How many seats is the Irvine Bowl?

Twenty-six hundred seats. So it’ll essentially double our audience size. To give context, we create three theaters in the Festival of the Arts, where you can watch movies during the day and night in different spaces. Our biggest event there had been Honk and Five Summer Stories, played two years ago — we had 1,800 people show up, and that was awesome. Music and film, what a cool genre. Both were from Laguna, so there was a very local, excited fan base. So now, adding the Irvine Bowl — 2,600 seats, two nights — and then Jack Johnson. What’s cool about the Jack Johnson program is that we’re actually going to show movies too. He’s remastered his two films, Thicker Than Water and September Sessions, and each night we’ll show one as part of the program, with music overlaid. So very unique experiences. To summarize, we have the Rivian Theatre, which we use nine nights — our showcase theater. Then the Festival of the Arts the second weekend, with multiple screens plus the Irvine Bowl. We do Snow Night there and show the latest TGR film. We have Chris Benchetler’s new movie, Mountains of the Moon, coming out, so we’ll premiere that with a lot of athletes. That’s Friday night, with Donavon Frankenreiter, Matt Costa, and the Great North Special playing after. Then another space we’ve created is Forest Avenue, closed off to cars, where we set up a stage and screen for a community night — Films on Forest, on Thursday. And one more, the Laguna Beach Cultural Arts Center, a really cool small black-box theater that seats 75, above the Candy Baron off Forest Avenue, that most people don’t know about.

I didn’t know about it — it’s by the Quiksilver store. Last year I got to run into Obi Kaufmann there, the artist and watercolorist, who we’ve profiled in Adventure Journal — we’ve used his art. He’s astounding, with a whole series of California atlases, fire and water and things. A brilliant individual, incredibly well-spoken. There were just 70 of us in there, very intimate with Obi. So it’s a cool space.

It’s a really cool space, for intimate dialogue.

Your slogan reminds me a teeny bit of the inspiration element of the Conservation Alliance Breakfast Talks — arrive tired, leave inspired. And what I really appreciate about the Coast Film Festival is that the setting makes a big difference in how you feel about it. Downtown Laguna and Laguna Canyon is a really special place. A lot of things are outdoor, it’s very small-town-feeling despite six million visitors a year. And the way you’ve programmed it, there are so many little surprises. Charles Adler, a longtime surf-industry art king — I don’t know what to call Charles, he’s a renaissance dude — has a gallery, and for you he curates a wall of art that’s for sale. He actually just did that for the Ohana Festival in Dana Point, put on by Eddie Vedder. And Stacy Peralta, the skater, is now getting into painting and had some of those. So you just don’t know what you’re going to see, but you know you’re going to come away enchanted.

We’re so appreciative to work with Charles, and for the first time, we’re going to name the gallery — the Coast Art Gallery, curated by Charles Adler, with an official sign. It’s a way to showcase the incredible talent of artists who tell the story of adventure and the outdoors through their own platform. You add that, and the storytelling, and the film, and the music, and it becomes this curated experience that challenges people to find their own adventure and come curiously inspired. Back to how we select films — we use all these theaters and moments and galleries. And I should add the Coast Summit, which has become a really important part of the festival — the notion that all these incredible people are coming to Laguna Beach, so let’s put them in the same room at the same time and talk about important, relevant topics, and also to the fans. The speakers there might also speak to some of these films, and we end up curating about 200 speakers — filmmakers, professional athletes, change-makers with a new product that’s making a difference. That’s really becoming who we are, and it affects how we select the films.

An event like this seems even more important as the culture has fragmented. One thing in the news lately is the Outdoor Retailer trade show moving to Minneapolis.

I love that.

It was in Reno, then Salt Lake, then Denver, then Salt Lake — it’s bounced around. One big lamentation people have is that Outdoor Retailer served as a place to bring the industry together with athletes, creatives, filmmakers, photographers, media. And in the festival world you have Telluride, Banff — both relatively remote and far from population centers — whereas you’re right in the heart of it. And a strikingly large number of outdoor and surf brands are located in Southern California. So the festival can play an increasingly critical role as a place for people to come together. Are you at the point where people are thinking of the Coast Film Festival as a destination?

It has become a destination for some who’ve found it. I’ve found that quite a few people I meet during the festival came across it by happenstance — hey, I’m in Laguna for something and your festival’s happening, I signed up for a movie or the hike or the trail run, and I fell in love with what you’re doing, and now I come back every year. There’s one couple from Canada who are our biggest champions, constantly texting, how’s it coming, we’re so excited. This year they’re bringing their children and renting a house for a month, because of the festival. But we market locally first. We want to be relevant to the local community — that’s our heartbeat. We have to be aligned with the educators, the city leaders, the artists, and then it ripples beyond that over time. If we’re doing a good job creating a unique experience, people will find us. We also have a marketing plan — we market to essentially a triangle from Santa Barbara to Phoenix to San Diego, and within that we use digital tactics to reach people who love the outdoors, film, and art. As we grow, we have to take responsibility for selling tickets and filling seats so it can sustain.

How’s that going? I know Jack Johnson sold out. How’s the overall festival doing this year?

It’s good, Steve. Our business model has always been that we sell sponsorships, and whatever we raise we spend on making the event happen, not relying on ticket sales, because that’s really out of our control. We still follow that vision. With Jack coming, that changed, because it was all about selling tickets, and they sold out in 48 hours. That was a new challenge — all of a sudden we had a ticket everybody wanted, versus us trying to convince people to come. Jack essentially dictated how it was going to be done; it was highly curated by his team, who are experts. We used a lottery system and multiple ticket engines that overlapped, to minimize third-party sales and scalping. Our venue is small at 2,600 seats, and our price point was low — $79, intentionally inclusive, not exclusive. Because of that, some people found the lottery difficult to manage, but the people who got tickets — we leaned into prioritizing our ZIP code, so it wasn’t all Jack Johnson fans from the West Coast, it was those plus the 92651 ZIP code, so we could protect that. We’re learning something new. I feel like I’m going to Shark Tank every day now meeting with their team. Our goal is to create a great experience for everybody, including the artists, but ultimately to bring this bowl online and have more concerts for the community, which frankly hasn’t happened regularly. How do we do it in a way that the community is happy and the neighbors are okay with the noise in their backyard once in a while?

That’d be amazing if you pulled it off. For such an incredible place with so many culturally aware people, there aren’t a lot of good music venues along the South Coast. There are very few. I was just looking at one that’s been around forever, the Coach House, which looks like it’s all tribute bands now.

It’s an easy thing to manage. The artists are expensive, so the second- or third-tier artists are relatively affordable and do their own marketing. From a business standpoint, that works. But for a consumer looking for new art, new music, that’s hard. I was in the desert recently — I went to Pappy and Harriet’s for the first time a couple of weeks ago. What a cool place.

You liked it.

I did. We saw the Oracle Sisters, who’ve become a favorite band of our family over the years. They’re from France, a really cool young band on a U.S. tour, and they really wanted to play Pappy and Harriet’s. It was so cool — small, cool venue, not expensive, like $35 to see a cool band and stay at an Airbnb overnight.

Did you go down to the Red Dog or walk around Pioneertown?

I walked by the Red Dog, and took a video of it pulsing to share with our friend Red Dog — Dave Reddick, still the photo editor at Powder, who Steve and I worked with many moons ago. I really wanted to go for a run — I’ve gotten really into trail running lately, I brought my shoes, but didn’t get out there. It looks like there’s so much space.

You have to be careful around snake season, there’s a lot of rattlers. Ben just ran across the Sierra — west to east. How did you do it?

It was across the Sierra. I did what’s commonly referred to as the Sky Marathon, which starts out of the Bishop area. You go up Pine Creek and around through Pirate Pass. It’s called the Sky Marathon because it’s frankly in the sky — the average elevation is 10,200 feet. You go up a pass and down a pass, but most of it’s up high on a big bench. It’s absolutely beautiful, about 26 miles long. Amazing run. I’m old, I shouldn’t be running — I’ve had two knee surgeries — but I find running really helps me meditate, get into a space that lets me focus and connect with nature. And trail running here in Laguna is fantastic, particularly midweek. It’s like our country club — like being in Mammoth on a Wednesday, there’s no one there, and you can have all the runs to yourself.

It is astounding.

So getting up into the Sierra is a great motivator to stay fit.

I love the idea that the future is created by optimists. You don’t launch a festival or a magazine unless you’re optimistic. How is optimism made manifest in what you’re doing with the festival?

It’s so relevant today. If you turn on any news, go down any rabbit hole, it tends to bring you down. Maybe I became an optimist when I was young, but most of my career and decisions have been made based on a positive outlook and the idea that you can make something happen — not that it’s impossible, but that it is possible. I had a boss once who told me I always looked through rose-colored glasses, and he brought it to me as a negative. How can that be a negative? It took me a minute, because I never really saw optimism as a tool or a muscle. But in the current circumstances, reflecting on my past and so many businesses I’ve started or led through an optimistic approach, it really is a tool. It’s not just an emotion — it’s something you can use to your benefit, to look through the challenges and see the light through the forest. Applying that to the festival: let’s keep doing it better, let’s keep growing it, and let’s do it carefully, not whimsically, looking at the numbers and with a certain level of responsibility, but really challenging and pushing ourselves. It’s just like running that run in the Sierra — it’s hard, it’s a challenge, but you’re not going to do it if you don’t try. So why not?

Could you address the power of filmmaking to change things? From where I sit, thinking about the magazine, I love words, that whole process — but I put it out in the world and we often don’t hear anything. With films, you can watch people’s reaction, you can have activations at the end of shows. Can you talk about the power of filmmaking, and what you’ve learned in terms of motivating people to take action? I know you have some big hitters in the conservation space, like Jeremy Jones, who come and talk about wanting to change things.

Steve, you remember The Blizzard of Aahhh’s?

Of course.

That came out right when I graduated from college and decided to go to Colorado for a year.

This is Greg Stump — very epochal, groundbreaking and heavily influential ski movie, back in what, ’88, ’89?

In that, Scott Schmidt, Mike Hattrup, and Glen Plake were the heroes. I watched that movie a thousand times. I still have the original VHS, totally worn on the edges. I’ve watched a lot of films, and sponsored a lot of movies when I worked at Powder, realizing how important films were to the community we served. When I worked at the Sierra Club, I realized another angle of purpose behind content — think of the Ansel Adamses and John Muirs of the world, who made an incredible impact through stories shared with people in a place to make a difference, starting with national parks. So, seeing the bigger view — if we could put all these films in one place and gather people who were curious and wanted to make a difference, then we’d have something. You look at all these movies funded for whatever reason — a branded film, or supported by a nonprofit like Protect Our Winters — as a way to engage a broader community. But the films have to be good; they can’t just be a commercial. The power of film: you sit in a dark room next to a stranger, watching a film you’ve heard about but don’t know until you watch it, and you become emotionally and intellectually engaged. You laugh, you cry, the lights come on, you look at the person next to you and go, wow, that was cool. And then you leave and you’ve been informed by new subject matter, inspired by that storyline. Steve, after our first festival, we showed a bunch of movies about sea farming and commercial fisheries, and I’ll never forget a person who recognized me by the festival hat I was wearing. She pulled me aside and said, gosh, ever since I saw that movie, I’ve stopped buying tilapia at Trader Joe’s, I no longer buy fish the way I used to. For my career, I’ve seen how films can make a difference, but to actually hear people resonate —

That’s really cool. And as Ben’s sharing that with me — hopefully it’s okay to share — he’s getting choked up, and now I am, because there are just so many good people in the world, and so many in our community trying to do good things. It feels like we’re fighting the forces of darkness with one hand behind our backs. It’s exhausting. I get angry and sad that when I talk to people like you, Ben, or go to a film festival and see all these incredible talents sharing stories that move you, and then I think about how much bad there is in the world — there are so many good people doing so many good things, and we have to fight AI and slop and all these things when there’s so much goodness right there. Last year, to my regret, I didn’t see it — you told me to — but one of the key movies was about these artists in Kyiv, in Ukraine. They were porcelain artists.

Porcelain War is the movie. They’re porcelain artists highly connected to nature, who engage through their art with nature, and when their town was invaded, they were turned into soldiers to protect their community and country. It’s such a beautiful, well-told story. It’s available on most streaming platforms now, and it won a few awards and made the shortlist for an Academy Award. Those are the kinds of stories that need to be shared, and we’re so lucky to have a community here in Laguna that comes out for them. For this upcoming festival there are a couple of gems. Our opening night film is The Eyes of Ghana, a beautiful story that opened at the Toronto International Film Festival and showed at Sundance. We’ve been chasing it — come on, you don’t know us, but we really want to show your film — and we got it. So opening night, Rivian Theatre, 150 seats, working on getting some of the filmmakers to come. We use the trip to Laguna as part of our offering. All these films deserve to be shared. Over 90 films this year.

What’s your mix of indie filmmakers versus branded and nonprofit-supported?

Our second year, I was sitting next to a stranger during a short-film block. So many of the films we get are funded by a nonprofit or a brand — that’s where a lot of this great content comes from, whether Patagonia or The North Face or REI or Yeti, who all put quite a bit of money into this space. And this gentleman, a film festival person, commented afterward that some of these were paid-for films. I never saw them that way, but he declared that an issue for him — that it wasn’t a true documentary because it was funded by a brand. After that, I realized there is a difference. There are films self-funded by an artist, and films funded by an art house. But at the end of the day, our job is to find the films that need to be shared, not how they were funded. In most cases, we’re finding the films that are underfunded, because they’re really seeking us out.

And even the ones you’d call independent, from some of the larger production companies — you don’t want to know what goes into the sausage-making. Who gets what segments, how long they are. These aren’t docs.

One of the films we’re showing is Andre Is an Idiot — a really good film, but an A24 film. As I was watching it with my son, who’s also into film, he’s like, dad, you got an A24 film? And I was like, yeah, isn’t that great? They actually let our little festival show one of their incredible works of art. We don’t have a predisposition — the stories are what matter, not how big the budgets are. Sometimes the budget dictates how clean the story is, or how many years it took to make. But if the story needs to be shared, we’ll share it.

So how does it work when you get films? You get these submissions, but then, with A24, how do you find out about a film? Do you see it somewhere else, and they have people who deal with festivals and vet them?

The bigger film houses have a festival person who manages their festival distribution. That’s marketing and promotion — they’re trying to build awareness so the film gets purchased, or to build awareness of their name. Those are the films that go to Sundance and TIFF, and we don’t spend a lot of time there. We’re more into Mountainfilm and Telluride, or 5Point in Carbondale, or Banff — a little smaller. Ultimately they find us through a platform called FilmFreeway, an online service for filmmakers to submit to festivals that most festivals subscribe to. And another angle is us going out and finding them. Unfortunately we don’t have the trade shows of the past where we could go to OR and meet all the filmmakers. So now film festivals are becoming a tighter-knit community — people come to our festival, we go to theirs. Which is good for the filmmakers. Our audience is different than the one that goes to Telluride for Mountainfilm — we have access to a huge audience, from L.A. to San Diego. And we have twice a week at the Rivian Theatre, so we have 20, 30, 40,000 people a year that we put these films in front of. As a foundation whose mission is to seek and promote films that inspire change, that helps clarify our role. The festival is an awesome experience, but it’s also a way to attract an audience and promote films that inspire, and promote filmmakers so they can be seen and grow their business.

You didn’t launch as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, but you transformed into that. Was that always part of the plan, or an obvious evolution?

It was an evolution. I started as a for-profit, part of a marketing agency I’d started, which served as an incubator to launch the festival. As it grew, we realized the purpose and mission was really to give back. We were writing checks to the Surfrider Foundation and Protect Our Winters and the filmmakers we gave awards to, and we realized our true destination was to give back more. As a nonprofit, we could make a bigger difference. We applied and were accepted very quickly — in about one year, we became a nonprofit in 2022. And frankly, Steve, we’re still learning what that means, because it’s a lot of work. It creates an opportunity to fundraise through grants, and we can accept donations. Ultimately, we’re in a much better place as a nonprofit.

How’d your fundraiser go? I’m very sorry I missed it.

That was our first fundraiser event, and it was awesome. It was hard, because we had to charge a lot for a ticket — $250 for a dinner, which was contrary to our typical price point. We try to be as inclusive as we can, but it was an opportunity to raise money. We met a lot of new people drawn to that type of event. We had Greg MacGillivray, and Josh “Bones” Murphy, talk story and emphasize the power of film and impact filmmaking. We had some young students awarded scholarships from our foundation, now studying filmmaking in school or starting a career in it, in part from our support. So it helped paint the whole picture of our mission and why we exist.

I’m excited for this year’s festival, and to see where you go with it. My experience with festivals — if you haven’t been to one, or you’ve only watched the Banff tour, there’s just nothing like being there in person. You don’t know who you’re going to meet or what you’re going to see. Everybody wants to sit home and scroll and watch through Netflix, but there’s no substitute for being there. One of the things I love about your festival is that everybody’s really accessible. The bar is right next to Charles’s wall of art, by the coffee. It’s very down home. You’ve created something a lot of people are craving, and it’s just a matter of reminding them to break through the inertia and come down.

Thanks, Steve. That’s a nice compliment, because that is what we’re creating — a community, using the power of art and story to bring the community together. In some cases they find us from far away, and others live just down the street and come all nine nights. We have programs with the schools, environmental education programs for all ages. Come curiously inspired. I don’t think we’d leave anybody dissatisfied.