Our Philosophy

We exhibit, create, and preserve the big screen experience for our community.  Our mission as the premiere film establishment of our state is to promote diversity of film exhibition and creation, and to educate, advocate, and inform about and through cinema. We foster film talent and cultivate film appreciation and participation. Our programs and venues welcome and are accessible to everyone in our community, ensuring that the potent ideas and voices of film are available to all.

We seek to exhibit works by and about underrepresented people. We embrace diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging—in terms of age, gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, national origin, ability, sexual orientation, and other complexities of humanity.

We recognize we are and have historically been a primarily white and LGBTQIA+ institution and that we have work to do to build positions and leadership roles for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).  We recognize we must commit to ever-improve how we include and represent our community, how we learn about diverse experiences, how we can be allies of BIPOC, be anti-racist, and be allies of various institutions that work to improve the state of our complex communities and understandings of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We recognize that there is much that we do not know and commit to learning as much as we can about the experiences of all people.

This ethic to learn and change finds expression in our organizational culture, values, norms, and behaviors.  It is our enduring commitment to understand and address the needs of people in the communities we serve.  We do this by demanding balance for age, gender/gender identity, race/ethnicity, national origin, ability, sexual orientation, and other complexities of humanity in representation when building our boards, nurturing/growing leaders, selecting program partners, hiring, and educating. Our objective is to create an institution that mirrors this robust diversity and breadth of human complexity we see in Salt Lake County and our nation.

We hold ourselves accountable to monitor how well we’re doing and prioritize diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging into the fabric of SLFS identity. We do this because we know that innovation, progress, growth, relevance, and capacity depend upon an accurate sense of what is coming: and, by all measures, there is no future if we do not meet the needs of our community.