December days are short, dark and cold, but prayer flags will soon flutter in the spring breeze: Passes for the 2016 Telluride Mountainfilm festival, scheduled for May 27-30, are on sale now at special early bird prices.

Between now and mid-March, you can purchase Fitzroy passes for $130, Sunshine passes for $300, Wilsons for $350 and Six Packs for $175. Visit Mountainfilm’s website for more pass information.

We encourage you to buy passes early because the festival is expected to sell out again in 2016. Our pattern of growth shows no signs of slowing, which brings us to the topic at hand: some changes for the 38^th annual festival.

During the downtime this summer, our staff and board put their heads together and brainstormed ways to improve the festival, initiatives and organization as a whole. These strategies will help create more amazing experiences, share more stories with a global audience and, most importantly, inspire more people to action.  

To give substance to our punchy new mission statement of using the power of film, art and ideas to inspire audiences to create a better world, we also hammered out real numbers. We aim to inspire 2 million people to action by the end of 2020 through Mountainfilm on Tour, the education programs and festival events. This goal goes beyond the act of simply inspiring—we want to contribute to real actions.

Over the summer, we pored over survey feedback and talked a lot about how to retain the intimate festival experience with our growing festival. We heard a desire for more access to films, reduced waiting time and managing queues more efficiently. So moving forward, we aim to ameliorate these problems with a multi-pronged approach that includes these changes:

1. More Friday Programming: We’re expanding our film offerings by starting films during the day on Friday, which is usually reserved solely for the Moving Mountains Symposium. This, we believe, will alleviate some of the pressure to see films on opening night and spread audiences out between more programs. It’s an experiment, but we’re excited about it and think people will continue to show up for the symposium.
    
2. Queue Team 12: We’ve created a queue team, a group of folks specially equipped to manage lines, communicate theater capacities, enforce the system and let people know other options if theaters are full.
    
3. Better Communication: Through our website, mobile app and internal communications, we plan to get the word out more efficiently on TBAs, festival updates, theater capacity and other breaking festival news.

Thanks to all who provided feedback. It was instrumental in developing these changes. We’re always open to ideas, so if you have thoughts about how to make any of these things more awesome, or other ideas for the festival, please contact us.

Once again, buy your passes early! We anticipate that they’ll go fast.