The Washington West Film Festival returns to Reston from Thursday, October 8, through Monday, October 12. Almost every screening runs at LOOK Dine-In Cinemas on Market Street in Reston Town Center, where the festival has scheduled two red carpets, filmmaker Q&As, four selections from this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the East Coast premiere of a Jimmy Stewart biopic. The last screening moves across town to the Leila Gordon Theatre at Reston Community Center in Hunters Woods.
Brad Russell founded the festival in 2011. Washington West contributes 100 percent of its net box office proceeds each year to charity projects that work against childhood hunger, illness and poor education. In 2023, USA Today 10Best voters ranked it the No. 2 film festival in the country.
The festival starts a week early with an outdoor screening of Disney’s 1991 animated Beauty and the Beast at the Reston Town Center Pavilion on Friday, October 2, at 7:30 p.m. Later this fall the same Pavilion turns into the Town Center’s ice rink.
Opening night on October 8 follows Ali Truwit from a shark attack to the Paralympics
The festival opens Thursday at 7 p.m. with Stronger Than You Think, a 99-minute documentary directed by Janice C. Molinari and Melissa Forman. In May 2023, days after she graduated from Yale, where she swam on the varsity team, Ali Truwit was snorkeling in Turks and Caicos when a shark attacked her. Surgeons amputated her left leg below the knee. About fifteen months later she swam for the United States at the Paris Paralympics and came home with two silver medals.
Truwit, director Janice C. Molinari and Jamie Barone, who also appears in the film, are scheduled for a Q&A after the screening. The red carpet starts at 6:30 p.m., and the ticket covers a drink and desserts at the Opening Night Party after the film.
Thursday’s second feature, Union County, starts at 8 p.m. Will Poulter and Noah Centineo play brothers in rural Ohio working through court-ordered drug treatment during the opioid epidemic, and director Adam Meeks fills out the cast with non-professional actors who bring their own experiences to the screen. The film was a 2026 Sundance selection, and the festival lists a content warning for substance use.
Friday, October 9, pairs Jane Elliott’s documentary with two blocks of short films
Short Film Friday begins at 5:30 p.m.: two programs separated by a Mix & Mingle intermission, with catered dessert and one drink included in the ticket. The first block, “Music, Mischief, Memory Lane,” includes Candy Bar, a Sundance short about a girl who thinks a man in the candy bar line looks like her father, and Deep in My Heart Is a Song, in which cowboy singer Johnny Bencomo plays a version of himself. Julian Curi, director of Gruff, a short about a spy who risks her life for her father’s applause, will take questions after the first block. The second block, “Where Do We Go From Here?,” includes Home Plate, about former New York Yankees draft pick Andrew Chin, and Leg Day, an animated short about a penguin that refuses to skip leg day.
At 6:30 p.m. the festival screens Jane Elliott Against the World, Judd Ehrlich’s documentary and another 2026 Sundance selection. In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Elliott divided her all-white third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa, by eye color and treated one group as inferior for a day, then reversed the roles. The lesson brought her national attention and years of conflict with her own community. The film follows her into her 90s, still teaching it. Killer Mike and Ibram X. Kendi also appear.
Saturday, October 10, runs from student films at 11 a.m. to the closing night premiere
The George Mason University showcase at 11 a.m. collects 13 recent student films, from introductory production work through senior theses, with a live filmmaker Q&A. At 1:30 p.m., Virginia Commonwealth University presents (CAP)SULE: New Voices in VA, four documentary shorts by VCU filmmakers.
A Mosquito in the Ear has its D.C. premiere at 11:30 a.m. Jake Lacy and Nazanin Boniadi play an American couple who travel to Goa, India, to adopt a four-year-old girl, who then refuses to leave the orphanage she calls home. Two documentaries start at 12:30 p.m., each followed by a filmmaker Q&A. ESL: More Than a Language follows immigrant families through a three-generation English class, and Seeing Without Sight looks at beauty through the eyes of girls and women losing their vision.
The 2:30 p.m. shorts block, The Caring Collective, holds three documentaries about people looking after one another. The Art of Sharing follows Michelin-starred chef Minh H. Phan and her work on food waste and hunger. Untethered goes to Guatemala, where Beeline Wheelchairs builds all-terrain wheelchairs for children with limited mobility. The Stories We Carry, a 21-minute film about students learning to listen to each other, has its world premiere. The filmmakers will take questions afterward.
FreeLance, a television pilot from the Turner Brothers about young creatives working odd jobs to cover rent, has its East Coast premiere at 3 p.m. It was also a 2026 Sundance selection, and actor Bernard “B-NARD” Clark and executive producer Cynthia Turner will take questions.
The Cashier has its D.C. premiere at 3:30 p.m. The R-rated dark comedy, shot in Richmond, stars Daphne Maxwell Reid as Glenda, a 78-year-old churchgoing cashier at a hardware store who finds a $1.6 billion lottery ticket that is not hers. Andy Edmunds, director of the Virginia Film Office, makes his feature directing debut with it. Edmunds, Maxwell Reid, actor Michael Marunde and Tim Reid, the Norfolk native who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP in Cincinnati, are all scheduled for the Q&A. The Reids, married since 1982, opened New Millennium Studios in Petersburg in 1997.
At 5:30 p.m., Trade Secret, an Australian documentary filmed over six years in nine countries, follows three people trying to end the legal international trade in polar bears.
Closing night honors Robert Duvall and premieres Jimmy
Robert Duvall died on February 15 at his Virginia farm, at 95. The festival calls him a dear friend and philanthropic partner, and on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. it opens closing night with a 20-minute tribute to Duvall, his wife Luciana and the Robert Duvall Children’s Fund, which the couple started in 2001 to repair homes, schools and medical facilities in northern Argentina. Luciana Duvall is scheduled to attend.
The tribute leads into the East Coast premiere of Jimmy, Aaron Burns’s film about Jimmy Stewart in the years between his Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story and It’s a Wonderful Life. In between, Stewart enlisted, flew 20 combat missions over Europe and rose to colonel. KJ Apa plays Stewart, and the cast includes Jason Alexander, Neal McDonough, Sarah Drew, Rob Riggle and Karolyn Grimes, who played Zuzu Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life as a child.
Tickets to the 6:30 p.m. screening include the tribute. A second screening, without the tribute, starts at 7:30 p.m. The festival lists a red carpet at 6 p.m. and names Burns and producer Angela Galgani Sullivan among the guests. Fathom Entertainment releases Jimmy nationwide on November 6, about four weeks after its Reston premiere.
Sunday and Monday add three features at LOOK and Holding Liat at Reston Community Center
Sunday’s three screenings stay at LOOK. Loving Karma at 11 a.m. follows Lobsang Phuntsok, sent to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery as a struggling boy, who later founded Jhamtse Gatsal, a home for children in the Indian Himalayas. The feature expands an Emmy-winning short and returns to the home twelve years later. Papertown at 1:30 p.m. visits a small Appalachian town after the paper mill that employed it for more than a century shuts down. Yesterday Island, an Australian comedy, has its D.C. premiere at 4 p.m.; a failed novelist agrees to mind a friend’s research station on a remote island for one day and ends up stuck in a time loop.
The festival ends Monday at 7:30 p.m. with Holding Liat at the Leila Gordon Theatre, 2310 Colts Neck Road. Reston Community Center renamed the theater in 2024 for Leila Gordon, its longtime executive director; until then the room was CenterStage. Brandon Kramer, a distant relative of the family, directed the documentary, which won the Berlinale Documentary Award in 2025. It follows the family of Liat Beinin Atzili after Hamas took her hostage from her kibbutz on October 7, 2023, as her father, Yehuda Beinin, resists efforts to use her captivity to justify escalating violence in Gaza. Darren Aronofsky is among the producers. Kramer will stay for a discussion afterward, and tickets for this screening go through Reston Community Center rather than the festival.
Box office proceeds have gone to children’s causes since 2011
The festival picks a different charity project each year. Proceeds from the first festival in 2011 went toward building a theater and community center in Haiti, and in 2013 the money helped rebuild Breezy Point, the Queens neighborhood Hurricane Sandy devastated in 2012. Last year’s beneficiaries were Our Military Kids, an Oakton nonprofit that pays for extracurricular activities for children of service members and veterans, and the Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, which funds youth sports programs worldwide.
This year’s sponsors include Reston-headquartered Leidos, the Reston Town Center Association, Reston Community Center, Amazon and the Virginia Film Office.
Passes run $100 to $250, and single tickets sell through Eventive
The festival sells tickets and passes through Eventive.
- General Festival Pass, $100: unlimited regular-priced features, regular shorts programs and the university showcases. It does not cover opening night, Short Film Friday or closing night.
- Premium Festival Pass, $250: everything in the General pass, plus the opening night film and party, Short Film Friday, closing night and priority line access.
- Philanthropic All-Access Membership, $1,000: all Premium benefits, two passes for guests, guaranteed seating until 15 minutes before showtime and invitations to private events with festival leadership and filmmakers.
General and Premium passholders must RSVP for each screening and arrive at least 25 minutes before showtime to guarantee a seat. The festival’s FAQ lists single tickets from $20 for standard screenings to $40 for spotlight events, and all sales are final, though the festival may refund a screening it cancels and does not reschedule. Most festival films carry no MPA rating, so the festival asks audiences to judge what suits their kids.
LOOK is a dine-in theater, with food and drinks ordered and served at your seat, so arriving early leaves time to order before the lights go down. Reston Town Center’s parking garages sit a short walk from Market Street, and the Reston Town Center Metro station on the Silver Line is about half a mile to the south. For Monday’s screening, Reston Community Center shares free parking with Hunters Woods Village Center.
LOOK, the Pavilion and Reston Community Center host events well beyond the festival
Washington West uses a dine-in cinema on Market Street, a Pavilion that holds summer concerts and winter skating, and Reston Community Center, which a special tax district on Reston properties funds and which runs its own theater season. If you are weighing a move to Reston or Herndon, or thinking about selling, reach out to us.
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