As the largest annual gathering of Art House cinema and festival professionals, community leaders, service providers and suppliers, the Annual Conference attracts participants from across the world. By defining our field, creating a shared vision and vocabulary, and identifying best practices, the Art House Convergence Annual Conference strengthen efforts to sustain Art House cinemas and film festivals of various sizes, operating structures, and programming philosophies. The goal of the Annual Conference is to engage Art House theaters, film festivals, film societies, museums, and other exhibition-oriented organizations through a variety of topics.

Equity and Inclusivity.
We commit to pursuing structural, economic, and conceptual equity, accessibility, and inclusivity. We recognize that the voices and experiences of people of color, people who are disabled, and people who are female-identifying and gender nonconforming, have often been unheard in conversations about our industry. This must change. We want all aspects of the conference to include many, and particularly historically suppressed, perspectives. We want to host conversations  with organizations of different regions, sizes, and non-profit/for-profit status and commit to hearing our community share ideas and experiences about how to foster equity and inclusion in programming, hiring, human resources, marketing, operations, outreach, and education.

Community Building.
We commit to addressing pressing challenges in our industry and developing better structures to support open discussion, collaboration, and participation. We are guided by the following following questions: “What are the most challenging topics facing our industry?” and “How can we take risks, collaborate, and support each other in addressing these topics?” We commit to hosting more workshops, small group sessions, and speakers, and to devoting more time for unstructured networking. We will also continue to invite participants from related industries to share their perspectives.

Elevate the Conversation.
We commit to ensuring the conference remains relevant. We want to challenge ourselves and push conversations in new and sometimes difficult directions. We embrace new ways of thinking and strongly encourage radical and innovative conversation topics. We welcome participation from people of all levels of expertise and will offer introductory and advanced educational experiences.

Action Beyond the Conference.
We commit to offering tools to facilitate action throughout the year. We believe that takeaways from panels should be as clear and tangible as possible. We encourage panelists to think about different learning styles and to engage attendees using visuals, sound, and handouts.