The Mill Valley Film Festival is the engine that drives everything else. Founded in 1978, it has grown from a modest local event into an 11-day celebration that draws filmmakers, industry figures, and audiences from around the world. The festival screens American and international features, documentaries, and shorts, and its programming has developed a reputation for catching Oscar-worthy films early. Industry publications have noted its quiet influence on the awards race -- a festival that lacks the red-carpet spectacle of Sundance or Toronto but carries real weight with voters and distributors. What sets Mill Valley apart is its intimacy. Filmmakers introduce their own work. Audiences ask questions. Conversations continue in the lobby, on the sidewalk, at the café next door. For a festival that attracts 70,000 participants, it still feels like something the town owns rather than something imposed on it.

In 1999, CFI took over a three-screen arthouse theater in downtown San Rafael and renamed it the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center. The venue became CFI's year-round home, a place where the festival's ethos -- independent voices, global perspectives, direct engagement with filmmakers -- could live twelve months a year instead of just eleven days. The Rafael Film Center programs first-run independent and studio films alongside documentaries, classics, and retrospectives. It hosts events with Bay Area filmmakers and visiting directors from around the world. The theater serves approximately 200,000 attendees annually, a remarkable number for a three-screen nonprofit venue in a city of 60,000. What makes the Rafael Film Center work is not its size but its curation. Every screening feels chosen rather than distributed, a film someone believed in enough to put on the schedule.

The Sequoia Theatre in Mill Valley was built in 1929, during the golden age when every American town of any ambition had a movie palace. By the 2010s, it was being run by the Cinemark chain, leased from the heirs of the Blumenfeld Theaters family, and showing the same wide-release films you could see anywhere. In 2018, CFI paid $2.5 million to buy the theater outright, adding a second historic venue to its portfolio. The acquisition was an act of preservation as much as expansion. A chain-operated theater can close when the lease math stops working. A community-owned theater answers to different priorities. CFI announced plans in 2022 to add additional screening rooms below ground level, though that renovation has not yet begun. The Sequoia officially reopened on May 20, 2024, after renovations, with a week of classic films at one dollar admission -- a gesture that said more about CFI's values than any mission statement could.

Beyond festivals and theaters, CFI runs an education program that brings film literacy to schools and young audiences across Marin County. The program reflects Fishkin's original conviction that cinema is not merely entertainment but a form of communication worth teaching. Students learn to read films the way they learn to read books -- with attention to structure, point of view, and the choices a storyteller makes. DOCLANDS, CFI's documentary film festival, extends this mission into nonfiction storytelling, creating a dedicated space for films that explore the real world with the rigor and craft of the best journalism. Together, these programs form an ecosystem: the festivals discover films, the theaters show them, and the education programs teach audiences how to think about what they have seen. It is a model that treats moviegoing not as a transaction but as a cultural practice worth sustaining.