A Welcome Message
from Festival Director Billy Palumbo

Hello, WOEFF-goers!

​

It’s the fifth year of the Wide Open Experimental Film Festival. When we started, one of goals was to introduce experimental film to our audience. We don’t need to do that anymore. We don’t need to explain why avant-garde cinema is worthy of our attention and praise.

Just look around at the local film world:

• Oklahoma Film Exchange has given consistent screen time to experimental film, including (but not limited to!) a screening series in partnership with WOEFF

• OKCMOA has remained a consistent and committed partner of WOEFF’s for four years; their generosity and support has been of existential importance to our continuation

• deadCenter Film Festival has included experimental shorts programs and has had WOEFF representatives as Q&A moderators, workshop educators, and selected filmmakers

• deadCenter’s Continuum program has shown experimental films and filmmakers over the past several years, including works by Indigenous filmmakers and other members of marginalized populations

• Oklahoma Contemporary has continuously showcased theatrical and gallery-based film and video work since its new campus opened

• Picture Garden and Tulsa’s Available Light Cinema carry the DIY spirit of experimental film screenings and workshops.

In short, experimental film is here and thriving, and WOEFF is the festival dedicated to its championing and growth.

​

To put it plainly, experimental film makes the world a better place. It is a direct exchange between filmmaker and spectator, uncontrolled and uncensored. Experimental film is best approached with no expectations and no conditions that it must satisfy. It is an art form that is liberated and therefore liberating. WOEFF believes everyone deserves to experience these works, so we have no charge for admission to the screenings and no fee to read the analytic essays and interviews on our website.​

We mean our slogan in every sense: FREE MOVIES.

​

What we love about experimental film is its humanity. I, for one, would rather die than use AI to develop, generate, or edit any WOEFF promotional content. In its current state, generative AI is incompatible with art. It separates product from process and, in doing so, obscures the labor necessary to create art: it literally de-values art, art-making, and thought. Art and thinking are human activities to be grappled with and celebrated, not dreaded as a chore.​

What WOEFF offers — film viewership, interpretation, analysis, and inspiration — are similarly human activities to be celebrated rather than commodified. We are here not to be sold to but to be awed, not to be customers but to be participants.​​

We are here to be human beings among other human beings.

​

Welcome to WOEFF 2026.

​

Billy Palumbo, Festival Director

Visiting Professor of Film, Oklahoma City University