Every October, a marquee lights up outside a theater at 1501 W. White Mountain Blvd. Filmmakers fly in from other countries, wait tables of Los Angeles publicists show up with press kits, and a red carpet gets rolled across the same parking lot where you buy popcorn on a regular Tuesday night. All of it happens under a name that points somewhere else. The event is called the Show Low Film Festival. Nobody attending it will spend a single night inside the town of Show Low.
The theater is WME Village 8. Its own contact page lists the address as Lakeside, AZ 85929. So does the Town of Pinetop-Lakeside's event calendar, which files the festival under that same city name year after year. If you've lived on this side of White Mountain Boulevard for a while, you already knew this the way you know which grocery store parking lot floods first in monsoon season. If you're newer, it's worth saying plainly once: the festival wearing Show Low's name on its posters plays out entirely on your street.
The Address On The Marquee
This isn't a rumor or a technicality buried in a zoning map. It's how the theater refers to itself. WME Village 8's own site describes itself as an eight-screen theater servicing Lakeside, Arizona, full stop. The Town's own Planning and Zoning office, a few blocks down the same road, lists its physical address as Lakeside too. When the local paper covered last year's ceremony, the opening line placed the whole event inside the same four walls: the eighth annual festival filled the WME Theaters in Lakeside with red-carpet moments for filmmakers, producers, and fans over a four-day run in mid-October.
The theater itself has been there since 2009, built and operated by White Mountain Entertainment. It's not a pop-up venue rented for one weekend a year. It's the same eight screens where you catch a matinee in February, running an unusually crowded schedule for one week in the fall.
Nine Years Of A Red Carpet On Your Side Of Town
The festival is run by a mother-daughter team, Martina Webster and Dalea Faulkner. Webster is the CEO of Darmar Production LLC and serves as the festival's director and producer. Faulkner produces alongside her and runs media for the event. Teddy Croney, who owns the WME Village 8 theater the festival calls home, has taken the stage himself in past years to accept an award for hosting it.
Last October marked the eighth annual edition, running October 16 through 19 and screening 55 films across shorts and features. One of the trophies handed out that Sunday night, the Lighthouse Award, went to filmmaker Jorrit Van Der Kooi. Producer Robert Timmons picked up a producing award for his film "Do You Think of Me?" on the same stage. None of these names will mean anything to most people driving past the theater on a Tuesday. For one weekend a year, they're the reason the parking lot fills up early.
The festival describes its own scale this way: "Big enough to draw talent from around the world. Small enough to make real connections." Eight straight years running through the same theater on the same stretch of highway backs that up better than a tagline usually does.
If eight annual editions ran from 2018 through 2025, this October's festival is the ninth.
Why The Name Still Says Show Low
None of this is a mistake, and it isn't a snub either. Show Low sits on the highway corridor most outsiders already recognize as the gateway into the White Mountains, the town whose name shows up on road signs and trip planning sites well before Lakeside's does. For a festival built to pull submissions from filmmakers who've never set foot in Navajo County, and who are warned on the festival's own FilmFreeway page that it's a 3.5-hour drive down the mountain back to Phoenix, the more recognizable name is simply easier to search, easier to find on a map, easier to explain to a producer in another country deciding whether the trip is worth it.
That's a naming choice built for people who don't live here. For people who do, it means the actual event, the ticket booth, the popcorn line, the folding chairs set up for the Sunday awards show, sits a few minutes from home in a town whose name never makes it onto the poster.
What Changes On Your Street This October
This year's submission window closed August 15, and notifications to the newly selected Top 100 went out September 1. Filmmakers now have until September 10 to get their films converted into festival-ready DCP format, and until September 30 to lock in where they're staying so the festival can build its screening schedule around them. By the time the lights go down on opening night, the guest list has effectively been set for weeks.
The public-facing run looks like this:
- Thursday, October 15: opening party and filmmaker check-in
- Friday through Sunday, October 16 to 18: films screen across the theater's auditoriums
- Sunday, October 18: awards show, with at least one representative from every winning project required to attend
- Monday, October 19: out-of-town filmmakers depart, timed around that same long drive back to Phoenix
You don't need to submit a film to walk through the door. Passes are sold through the festival's own ticketing page in tiers, single-day, multi-day, and an all-access option that folds in workshops and the Sunday gala. Last year's edition added an AI-generated film category and debuted an all-access VIP pass with a reserved red-carpet photo alongside the filmmakers, a sign the event keeps adding layers rather than repeating the same three days on autopilot. One caveat worth knowing before you plan a family outing: films screen unrated, and the festival itself doesn't recommend the event for children.
For most of the year, WME Village 8 is just the theater. For one week every October, it's the reason parking is tighter than usual on White Mountain Boulevard, the reason you might spot an out-of-state license plate outside a coffee shop, and the reason a red carpet gets rolled out a few hundred feet from wherever you happen to live in Lakeside. The name on the marquee still says something else. The theater, the crowd, and the week itself belong here.
If you're curious what else sits quietly on this side of the highway, our guide to living in Lakeside covers more of what residents already know and newcomers are still discovering, alongside a closer look at mountain town life and lake days here.
Whether you've called Lakeside home for twenty years or you're still learning which festival actually belongs to your side of town, Erin Amos keeps a running local read on the White Mountains, one small detail at a time. If you're ever curious what your own corner of Lakeside is worth, a free home valuation is a good place to start.
