STATELINE, Nev. – Organizers of a new film festival planned at the Tahoe Blue Events Center on Oct. 4-6, hope the event causes a spark in its inaugural year.

“We’re featuring films that,” Festival Director and filmmaker, Michelle Ficara says, “light up the soul.” That’s Lake Tahoe Documentary Film Festival’s tagline and their full line up of 63 soul illuminating films just dropped.

“A lot of inspiring stories,” Ficara says. The documentary based film fest features anything from environmental, and outdoor-adventure, to social justice documentaries, including family-friendly films.

The director says some of the documentaries were selected to ignite broader conversations with post-screening Q-and-A sessions and panels, potentially with film directors there in person.

Ficara says it’s these in-between film activities that make it a festival. Organizers have parties planned every night in addition to workshops and daily activities, roasting marshmallows being one of them.

“You know, really, film festivals are all about community,” Ficara expresses. “It’s bringing people together. It’s having that shared experience of watching films and being able to talk about them afterward.”

The local community can look forward to films hand-picked and curated with them in mind. And with the event at the Tahoe Blue Events Center, all the films are presented in the same location, which helps cultivate community.

“In the same vicinity, everyone has their passes around their necks,” Ficara says, “You can go grab coffee and you see someone with their pass and you ask what film they went to.” She describes it as a whole weekend of building community through film.

Something unique about this festival is all the films are documentaries. “That’s what’s special about documentary, is that they’re non-fiction, right?” Ficara says and explains, “So we all see a little bit of ourselves in these films that we watch and learn a little bit about ourselves and the people around us from watching them.”

Ficara unintentionally fell into filmmaking while traveling abroad in the Peace Corps and living with an indigenous community in Latin America. “I was finding it increasingly more difficult to explain to my family and friends back home what my life was like down there.”

She instead decided to show them. “I found filmmaking as a way to connect my community that I was living in with my family and friends back home.”

This led her to pursue a graduate degree in social documentation at UC Santa Cruz.

“I just found it to be an incredibly powerful tool,” Ficara states, “to break down those boundaries and create empathy and build friendships.”

The born and raised South Tahoe filmmaker saw an opportunity to do this on a larger scale, here in Tahoe.

“Bring in these 63 films from all over the world to our tiny community that, you know, doesn’t have access to these types of cultures and stories normally, and be able to share them through a really powerful medium of non-fiction filmmaking and,” Ficara adds, “hopefully create some empathy and awareness.”

“Who knows,” she says, “who it may inspire to travel the world and make some more stories, or just change minds, or create a conversation.”

While the festival brings global films to the Tahoe stage, it will also spotlight stories of the Tahoe community, made by those who live here with its Local Lens program.

One of these films features the well known South Tahoe character, Christmas Carol. Director Rosie Frederick takes the viewer through many milestones of Christmas Carol’s life.

Another Local Lens comes from Tahoe’s Brian Walker. The local videographer, photographer and cinematographer created a film documenting growth from personal loss and destruction after the Caldor Fire, narrated by Jenna Dramise-Smaine.

The festival’s very own Michelle Ficara co-directed the recently PBS circulated documentary, Momentum, which features a born and raised Tahoe mixed martial artist, Chris Cocores, and his wrestling coach, Ryan Wallace, on their journey of Cocores’ comeback after tragedy.

Two Truckee based directors, Dominic Gill and Nadia Gill, created Planetwalker, a film covering John Francis’ walk across America in silence after the 1971 oil spill in San Francisco.

“I’m happy that we’re able to support the local community and local filmmakers and give them a platform and an audience to watch their work,” Ficara says, “but also hopefully it will inspire the youth and other potential filmmakers in town.”

The youth is a large focus of the festival with youth workshops and programs funded through a grant from the Tahoe Women’s Fund. The festival is open to all ages.

All access passes are available for $99 on the festival’s website. The pass provides access to all films as well as activities. Individual documentary tickets are also available for purchase.