The Topanga Film Festival was started over 20 years ago by Urs Baur who held the very first TFF in his own backyard. This Labor Day weekend, September 4-6, will be the festival’s first year since Urs stepped down as director, leaving the bulk of the responsibility to Scott Bremner and Adam Noble Roberts. TFF ’26 will be hosted by the Topanga Community Center (TCC) (located at 1440 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga, CA 90290)
I recently had the chance to chat with Scott and Adam about the upcoming festival, the history of their involvement, and the love and passion that goes into the event every year. As someone who plans to attend the film festival this year for the very first time, I found Scott and Adam’s excitement about the event, and the films selected for this year, to be contagious and inspiring. I left our meeting even more eager to attend than I initially expected.
The Topanga Film Festival has evolved over the years, but its goal to inspire audiences has stayed constant.
“I was fortunate enough to be at the very first one,” Scott Bremner explained to me. “Urs and I go back quite a ways, so I was there that [first] night and I was really impressed with it…I remember mingling afterwards… the energy level… the enthusiasm, and the excitement—people were just really inspired.”
The sparkling buzz of inspiration is something that TFF has greatly succeeded at igniting in its audience every year thus far.
Over the years, Adam Noble Roberts has become well-known in Topanga for MCing many local events, and in 2014 he was asked to MC the TFF awards show for the first time. He went on to MC a few special events here and there for Topanga Film Institute (the parent organization of the festival) and eventually joined as a core team member in 2022. Although this is Adam and Scott’s first year co-directing the festival, they have both been involved in some way or another for years now.
Adam told me, “Scott has been the Creative Director for a long time, I was the Program Director, but of course, we’re a small team, we’re wearing a whole bunch of hats so certainly we are doing a lot to produce the event and a million other things…” He continued, “This has always been a labor of love at its heart, and it continues to be a labor of love but it’s also a ton of work.” Adam and Scott emphasized to me the importance of the whole team at TFI, and made a point to acknowledge the names of some key people involved. The Topanga Film Festival is made possible by Maya Oløe, Deanna Read, Bill Bowling, Miranda Robin, Bruce and Teresa Royer, Darius Fisher, Andrea Shreeman, and many others.
For TFF ’26, the community house will be transformed into a theatre of 180 seats, with 40 seats in the Sages Room as a smaller and more intimate second theatre. Festival attendees can expect air-conditioning and blacked-out windows to make daytime screening pleasant.
“We’re gonna make [the event] comfortable and enjoyable for anyone who comes to have a great experience for the whole weekend,” Scott promises.
The festival will begin Friday evening from 6 pm-11pm, and will continue all day on Saturday and Sunday from 11am-11pm. The weekend will be jam-packed with short films, feature films with Q&As, DJs and musical guests, three exciting panels (AI Salon: AI and the Creative Soul, The Art of the Score: A Composer Panel, and Industry Prose: A Screenwriting Panel), food trucks, and an outdoor bar and lounge.
“A shared cinematic experience with community, with people you know and people you don’t know, holds an immense value that we think cannot be underrated, that we really believe in,” Adam says. “And we think the film festival environment is the best version of that.”
The full name of the theme for this year’s fest is Reframe: Cinema for Uncertain Times. Adam and Scott want to counter the division we are currently experiencing in our world and unite us in community, acknowledging our current challenges while reminding folks that we’re all in this together. Adam says: “The world does have a real topsy turvy feel to it right now and it is easy to slide into a cynical and negative headspace…we want to counter that [by] bringing [people] together and looking at the challenges that are before us as creative opportunities.”
Whether it’s a documentary about Dead Heads that piques your interest, or one about the man who ran 500 miles on psychedelics, or a Charlie Chaplin showcase, Topanga Film Festival 2026 has an incredible lineup that you don’t want to miss out on. There are a myriad of cheaper ticket options available for folks who don’t want to stay for every film, but the all-day passes are also incredibly worth the money, allowing attendees the freedom to pick and choose what to see all throughout the day while partying in between and making core memories with neighbors.
Topanga Film Festival 2026: REFRAME
