About SJSFF

San Joaquin Student Film Festival

Spring Festival (Early May) on FilmFreeway.com

Making a film is a strange, wonderful, occasionally terrible idea. It requires a camera, a story, a few people willing to be on camera, a few more willing to pretend they know what they’re doing, and an unreasonable amount of time spent staring at a timeline.

The San Joaquin Student Film Festival exists to give student filmmakers a place to put all of that effort. Started in 2025 by Weston Ranch High School teachers Patrick Windschitl and John Klaiber, we bring together young filmmakers from Northern California to share their stories, experiment with different kinds of filmmaking, and most importantly, actually see their work on a big screen with an audience.

Our goal is simple: build a community of young filmmakers and give them a reason to keep making things. Students shouldn’t have to move to Los Angeles, wait until college, or know somebody who knows somebody to experience a real film festival. If you made something worth watching, we want to watch it. If you’re still figuring out how to make something worth watching, we want you here too.

The festival welcomes fiction, documentary, animation, music videos, experimental films, horror, comedy, things that defy categorization, and probably at least one film that makes everyone in the room ask, “What exactly did we just watch?” That is, after all, part of the fun.

Reel Week

Fall Festival (Early November) Sign-up here

Reel Week is our fall annual filmmaking challenge, where student filmmakers have one week to make a short film using a required prop, line of dialogue, and genre. It is part film festival, part creative endurance test, and part beautifully organized chaos.

The point isn't to make a perfect film. The point is to make a film. Reel Week gives students a deadline, a ridiculous set of constraints, and a reason to grab their friends and start creating. Those limitations tend to produce surprisingly inventive results, and occasionally something genuinely brilliant.

Together, Reel Week and the San Joaquin Student Film Festival are about creating something that student filmmakers desperately need: a place to belong. A place to meet other people who make weird little movies, celebrate each other's work, steal absolutely no ideas whatsoever, and discover that there are other people nearby who are just as obsessed with telling stories.

Because the next generation of filmmakers is already making films. We're just giving them a screen.