After drifting throughout Ellensburg over the years, the Ellensburg Film Festival hopes to have found its permanent home on campus this fall.

McConnell Hall, home to CWU’s  theatre arts department, will host the 12th annual Ellensburg Film Festival this Friday through Sunday. Jon Ward, co-director of CWU’s film program, believes that the move to McConnell will help the festival draw in more people every year.

“A lot of my favorite film festivals were always the ones that were in a very controlled community, like RiverRun International Film Festival” in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Ward said.

“The [theater] screens are very close to each other. You get caught up in the festive atmosphere. I thought if we could have our screens next to each other, like in McConnell Hall, with a food truck outside, a beer garden as well, you have reason to park and stay for the whole day and see some films you haven’t seen.”

Rebecca Starkey, a senior film major who also serves as the president of Wildcat Films, believes McConnell Hall can be a lasting location where students can get to without much stress.

“I think for students it’s a lot easier to be in one place because a lot of students don’t have cars,” Starkey said.

“I don’t want to go somewhere else. Or I’ll get side tracked and think ‘I could watch a show on Netflix,’ but these films are only here for a limited time and I should [go to] that.”

Ward said the effort to make the move to McConnell Hall was a group decision between all the parties involved in the festival, including Scott Robinson, the theatre department chair, and Ralla Vickers, the Ellensburg Film Festival Coordinator.

“Dr. [Liahna] Armstrong and I were appointed as co-directors of the film program this last year, and as we looked at things that would benefit film students, the Ellensburg Film Festival came up,” Ward said.

“The positive atmosphere of a film festival is that our students typically submit films to film festivals, but wouldn’t it be good for students to see the other side of the process?

Part of working to continue our relationship with the festival is we get to see films from all over the world in one condensed time period.”

The festival consists of screenings of over 40 films, including shorts, feature-length films and documentaries. They will be shown in McConnell, the Tower Theatre and Screening Room 119 across the three-day festival.

In addition to the screening of select films, the festival will screen “Show Us Your Shorts,”  a contest last weekend where groups had just 72 hours to make a 10-minute short film.

On Saturday from noon to 1 p.m., the Hal Holmes Center will have a free showing of the Teenage Film Festival, after which “The Jungle Book” will be shown from 1:15 p.m. to 3 p.m.

The Ellensburg Film Festival will begin Friday at 4 p.m. in the McConnell Auditorium with a free screening of “Projections of America,” a documentary by visiting distinguished professor of film, Ian Scott, from the University of Manchester.

Narrated by John Lithgow, the film looks at American propaganda movies from the World War II era that were not shown to the public.

“Dr. Scott is going to introduce the film, and I’m encouraging all of our film students to go,” Ward said. “It’s a great way to kick off the festival … [and] sample the festival for free. We have a new projection system [in McConnell]. It’s a very nice viewing theater now.”