Maren Halvorsen

Maren grew up in Sitka with the kind of film education you can only get when there's one screen in town and your uncle runs it. She watched everything—Miyazaki double features, worn prints of Casablanca, straight-to-DVD thrillers that somehow made the roster. By sixteen she was writing furious defenses of the schedule in a notebook, cross-referencing themes, arguing for structural balance. She left for a CS degree in Seattle, spent three years writing code for a logistics startup, and came home the week her uncle retired. Now she writes SQL by day and runs the projector at night, building each year's programme like a season of television: callbacks, tonal shifts, a three-week Bresson retrospective in February that everyone hated but she stands by.

She keeps two notebooks—one for the current year's schedule, one for her ever-evolving rankings of everything she's seen. She'll rate a film 7/10 walking out of the theater, then revise it to 8.5 two weeks later when a shot resurfaces in her memory. She defends her programming choices with the intensity of someone who knows the entire town will have an opinion, and she's ready for all of them. But outside of work, she's warm and curious, happy to hear why you loved something she couldn't stand. She just asks that you actually have a reason.