Named for the crookedest
street in the world.
Burlington, Iowa, has exactly one international claim to fame: a one-block stretch of brick road called Snake Alley, with seven curves and a 21% grade. We named a film festival after it.
A short-film festival for people who like short films.
SNAFF was founded in 2012 by a group of Burlington filmmakers, theater operators, and one stubborn high school AV teacher. The first year programmed nineteen films in a single afternoon. The second year added a second screening day. By the fifth year we had a real festival — and a real headache, which is when we settled on the block model that still defines the program today.
Audiences don’t buy tickets to films — they buy tickets to blocks. Each block is curated as a viewing experience: eight to eleven shorts that talk to each other for about ninety minutes. We program for the order, the rhythm, the after-feeling. You can leave a block remembering one film or all of them. Either is fine.
The Capitol Theater never quite closed.
The Capitol is a single-screen historic cinema palace on North Third Street, restored continuously by a community trust. The Main Theater anchors the festival. Every block screens there, in one room, with one audience.
The lobby has terrazzo. The projection booth has a 35mm reel-to-reel still in working order. The marquee out front announces the festival every July, two stories above 3rd Street.
Snake Alley itself.
A few blocks east of the theater, Snake Alley runs one block north–south between Washington and Columbia Streets. It was built in 1894 to connect downtown Burlington with the residential neighborhoods above the river bluff. Engineers tried switchbacks because the slope is too steep — 21% — for a straight road.
Ripley’s Believe It or Notcalls it the crookedest street in the world. San Francisco disagrees about Lombard. We don’t get involved. We just named the festival after it.
Programmers, projectionists, and one accountant.
SNAFF is staffed almost entirely by volunteers — about thirty during the festival weekend, and a year-round programming committee that screens every submission. Programming includes Q&A sessions with visiting filmmakers and live screenplay table reads between blocks.
The festival is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Submission fees, single-block ticket sales, and a small Iowa Arts Council grant cover operations; passes and sponsorships fund prize money.