In the cool reaches of this hot American summer, the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival returns for its second annual celebration with an intimate, spirited weekend rooted in story, setting, and community.
Held September 16–19 at the Highlands Performing Arts Center, the festival gathers filmmakers, media artists, volunteers, neighbors, and visiting audiences for four days of screenings, conversations, special events, and connection. Its promise is not simply to show films, but to create a place where people sit together, talk afterward, meet the artists, and let stories linger long after the credits fade.
The festival’s identity is boutique and welcoming: a mountain gathering that favors meaningful encounters over crowds, quality over volume, and shared experience over passive viewing.
Weekend highlights include competition features and documentaries, special screenings, director Q&As, artist talks, hikes, fireside-style conversations, and a festive Black & White Masquerade.
The Awards Ceremony and Closing Remarks will be held at Saturday’s Black & White Masquerade,
The event also supports the Performing Arts Center and its educational theatre programs, giving every passholder a larger purpose.
This year’s program carries the enticing shape of a festival meant for discovery. Competition titles include Honeyjoon, Natchez, Hold Onto Me, Papertown, If These Walls Could Rock, Mallory’s Ghost, Susan, and The Oldest Person in the World.
Among the special screenings, Path of the Panther stands out as a cinematic call for the heroic work of protecting a world pushed to the brink of ecological collapse, while Patriot’s Day brings a locally connected screenwriter from Brevard whose involvement in the film’s research should make for a vivid audience conversation.
Path of the Panther, directed by Eric Bendick, follows a story that has grown beyond wildlife filmmaking into a movement for reconnection. Bendick describes the film’s impact as an “impossible idea” that could help reclaim “a connected planet” and “a home in balance.” In festival terms, it is exactly the kind of work that feels made for a mountain audience: urgent, beautiful, and hopeful.
Honeyjoon, from director Lilian Mehrel, offers a different but equally human invitation. Mehrel calls the film “a sexy grief comedy,” born from the strange truth of feeling sorrow in a beautiful place while the ocean keeps moving with neutral grace. Her description gives the film a generous, alive quality: funny because grief can be absurd, tender because loss is familiar, and luminous because beauty does not pause for heartbreak.
Natchez adds another note of place-based storytelling, sitting alongside films that examine memory, identity, resilience, and transformation.
Together, Path of the Panther, Honeyjoon, and Natchez help define the festival’s breadth: the natural world, the interior life, and the complicated histories that shape communities.
The festival spirit begins early with events designed to welcome the whole Plateau. On Wednesday, September 16, the public is invited to a Festival Kick-off at the PAC with Silly Ridge and a meet-and-greet with Artistic Director Joy Jorgensen, opening the celebration beyond passholders and insiders.
That same day at 1:00 P.M., the PAC hosts a free encore screening of Rise, Ruin, and Restoration: A History of Lake Toxaway, The Return of Lake Toxaway, directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Dan Johnson. The documentary revisits the creation of Lake Toxaway, the 1916 dam collapse, and the lake’s resurrection decades later. Registration is required, seating is limited, and Johnson will be available to discuss the film.
Ticketing is designed to make the weekend easy to enjoy, with options for films only, or films and seminars, while the Film Festival Society offers exclusive events, special access, and a closer behind-the-scenes relationship with the festival.
For schedules, passes, and updates, visit highlandscashiersfilmfestival.com; for Society membership questions, contact Charlotte Muir at cmuir@highlandsperformingarts.com. General festival questions may be directed to filmfestival@highlandsperformingarts.com or (828) 526-9047, ext. 5.
Add in summer screenings, director Q&As, volunteer energy, and the glow of Highlands and Cashiers in September, and the result is a festival with laurels earned by the films and the place itself.
At its heart, the Highlands-Cashiers Film Festival is a celebration of why we still gather in darkened rooms: to be surprised, moved, challenged, delighted, and returned to conversation with one another.
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