The marquee at the Mabel Tainter Center for the Arts on Main Street East lights up again September 24 through 27, and if you've caught the Red Cedar Film Festival before, you already know the shape of it: four days, a historic theater, filmmakers wandering the lobby between screenings. What you may not know is that this year's version is meaningfully bigger than the one you remember from last September, not in the vague way festivals always claim to be "bigger and better," but in numbers you can actually check against last year's program.
In 2025, the festival's seventh year, organizers screened 39 films from 11 countries. This year, the eighth, that's grown to 60 films from 12 countries, the result of a record number of submissions that gave the selection committee a deeper pool to choose from than in any previous year. That's not a rounding error. It's more than a third more films, pulled from a submission pool wide enough that the programmers had to say no to work that would have made the cut in a leaner year.
The Math Behind "Most Exciting Lineup Yet"
Festival marketing copy always promises its best year yet. Usually there's no way to check. Here there is: a same-source, same-venue comparison from one September to the next, with hard numbers instead of adjectives. Thirty-nine films becoming sixty is the kind of jump that forces structural changes, not just a longer program printed on the same schedule. And that's exactly what happened. To make room for the extra 21 films, organizers expanded the Thursday and Friday screening blocks, giving festivalgoers more windows to catch something on a weeknight rather than cramming everything into a Saturday marathon.
That expansion matters more than it sounds. A festival that only really happens on Saturday is a festival built for people who plan weekends around it. A festival that spreads meaningfully into Thursday and Friday evenings is one a Menomonie resident can drop into after work without rearranging much of anything. This year's version leans toward the second kind.
A Theater Built to Hold It
Growth like this needs somewhere to land, and the Mabel Tainter is not a generic black-box venue that just happens to host movies once a year. It opened in 1889, built from Dunnville sandstone, and its 261-seat Victorian auditorium is the kind of room that gives a small-town film festival a sense of occasion most cities twice the size of Menomonie don't have access to. The building also houses The Spirit Room, a speakeasy-style bar tucked into what used to be a 1950s soda fountain, which gives the festival's between-screening crowd somewhere to land besides the sidewalk.
That combination, a working Victorian theater with its own bar built in, is part of why a festival that started small has been able to scale without outgrowing its home. The venue was never the limiting factor. The size of the program was, and this year that constraint loosened.
The Film Nobody Expected From a Small-Town Lineup
The clearest evidence that RCFF's ambitions have grown alongside its film count is Saturday night's headline addition. At 7 p.m. on September 26, the festival is screening Broken English, a feature documentary about Marianne Faithfull from directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the same team behind 20,000 Days on Earth, which won at Sundance. Broken English had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2025 and its U.S. premiere at Sundance in early 2026. That's a film with a festival pedigree most regional programs never get near, and it's screening in a 261-seat Victorian theater on Main Street in Dunn County.
A festival that was content to stay the size it's always been wouldn't need to chase a booking like that. One that just posted its biggest submission jump in eight years apparently does.
More Ways to Watch Than Just the Screen
The other returning feature worth knowing about is the Director's Lounge, a space where filmmakers and audiences can talk between blocks instead of just filing out to the parking lot. It's easy to undersell what that actually does for a small festival. Most people who show up for a documentary about a Midwest dairy farm or an animated short from overseas never get to ask the person who made it a single question. Here, for four days, they can.
The festival also organizes its juried categories broadly enough to reflect the range of what's actually screening: narrative and documentary features and shorts, animated work in both lengths, a dedicated Midwest Roots category for films with regional ties, family-friendly programming, and student work in both feature and short form. That spread is part of why the festival draws a mixed crowd rather than just film-school types. There's something in the program for someone who wants a two-hour narrative feature and something for someone who only has an hour between errands.
Tickets work on two tracks. A festival pass covers every screening and event across all four days, with discounted passes for students and for seniors 65 and older. Single tickets work the same way for anyone who only wants one or two blocks. Every ticket, single or full pass, includes a beverage and appetizers, which is a small detail but a useful one if you're deciding whether to eat beforehand or just show up.
What the Rest of the Weekend Looks Like
Because the Mabel Tainter sits inside Menomonie's downtown historic district, a festival weekend here doesn't require much logistics planning once you're parked. A few blocks along Broadway Street get you to The Raw Deal, a coffee shop and roaster that's been serving the neighborhood since 2006, useful if you're catching an 11 a.m. block and need caffeine first. Lunch between screenings is an easy walk to Acoustic Cafe, which has been building hoagies on its own honey cracked wheat bread for more than three decades, a level of longevity that says more about a town's actual eating habits than any list of new openings could.
For dinner, or for anyone who wants to extend the night past the last screening, Lucette Brewing Company's Woodfire Eatery is a short drive from downtown, near the Red Cedar Trail head. It's known locally for Neapolitan-style pizza made with a 24-hour fermented dough and small-batch beer brewed on site, named after Paul Bunyan's sweetheart in a nod to the region's logging history. None of this requires advance planning. It's simply what's already there, within a few minutes of the theater, on the nights the festival runs late.
If You're Only Free for One Night
Saturday is the night to prioritize if your schedule only allows one. That's when Broken English screens, and it's also historically been the night the festival has leaned into its most community-facing programming, including free screenings that don't require a ticket at all in past years. If you're bringing kids or just want to test the festival without committing to a pass, Saturday has traditionally been the low-stakes entry point.
Thursday and Friday, now carrying more of the expanded schedule, are worth considering if you'd rather catch a couple of blocks on a weeknight and skip the bigger Saturday crowd. Either way, the math this year points to the same conclusion: a festival that grew by more than 50 percent in film count didn't do it by accident, and the 2026 lineup at the Mabel Tainter is worth treating as a genuine four-day event rather than a nice thing happening downtown that you'll catch next year instead.
For full schedule details and ticket information, the festival's own site at redcedarfilm.org and the Mabel Tainter's schedule page are the two places to check before the weekend arrives.
Living in a place means knowing what's actually worth your Saturday night, not just what's advertised as worth it. If you're weighing a move within Dunn County, or already here and thinking about what's next for your own home, Wanda Johnson has spent more than three decades getting to know this part of the Chippewa Valley block by block. Work With Wanda — Schedule a Consultation.
