2026 SJSFF

2026 San Joaquin Student Film Festival

They made the films. We turned off the lights. Then we found out what happened.

On May 1, 2026, student filmmakers from across the region brought their work to the San Joaquin Student Film Festival at Weston Ranch High School in Stockton. Films from K–12 and college filmmakers filled the big screen with everything from animation and documentaries to music videos, narrative films, and whatever other strange things students had managed to turn into movies.

But the real point of the festival wasn't simply to collect films and hand out awards. It was the audience.

There is something very different about watching your film alone on a laptop and sitting in a dark theater while an entire room watches it with you. People laugh at the joke. They gasp at the scary part. They react to the ending. For a few minutes, something that existed only on a hard drive becomes a shared experience.

That is what the San Joaquin Student Film Festival is built around: giving young filmmakers a real screen, a real audience, and a reason to keep making things.

The 2026 festival brought together student filmmakers, families, teachers, and community members for an evening celebrating the work—and occasionally the wonderfully bizarre ideas—of the next generation of filmmakers.

Thanks to everyone who made a film, showed up, watched, cheered, laughed, gasped, and helped make the 2026 festival happen.

The films are gone from the screen.

The memories, and .mp4's, remain.