For four days this spring, Traverse City went to the movies all over town. The first Traverse City edition of the Fresh Coast Film Festival showed more than fifty films in seven venues, from the City Opera House to spaces around Boardman Lake, about half of them by Midwestern filmmakers, and paired the screenings with bird walks, bike rides and a group sunrise. Tickets were ten dollars. The weekend passes sold out more than two months ahead, and both galas sold out too. Everyone who ran it was a volunteer.
The person at the center of it was Joseph Beyer, a writer, filmmaker and arts organizer who lives on the Old Mission Peninsula. Michigan forensics knew him first. He is a two-time state champion.
Two years, two events, two titles
Beyer won the state championship in Dramatic Interpretation for Holland High School in 1990, and came back in 1991 and won it in Prose. Those were the years when every event had a single field for the whole state, so there was one champion in Michigan in each, and both times it was him. Winning State once is hard. Winning it in two different events is something we can find only about two dozen people doing in nearly half a century of State Finals books.
He was born in Grand Haven and raised in Holland, with summers up north in Leland. His biography traces his love of the arts to live theatre, beginning in Holland High’s theatre department and in summers at Hope Summer Repertory Theatre. That department was only a few years old when he arrived: it was founded in 1986 after two students gathered more than a hundred signatures on a petition, and it was led by Kevin Schneider, Michigan’s Teacher of the Year in 1990 and later a member of the Michigan Speech Coaches Hall of Fame.
Park City
He earned a BFA at the University of Evansville, trained at Chautauqua, and went to Los Angeles, where he worked in film publicity and as a writer.
In 2002 he joined the Sundance Institute and stayed fourteen years, finishing as its director of digital initiatives. It was the stretch when independent film was moving online, and that was his beat. He produced the festival’s online edition. He led the Institute’s #ArtistServices program, which gave thousands of Sundance alumni help with funding, distribution and marketing. He ran its partnership with Kickstarter, which began in 2011 and went on to raise more than $18 million for more than three hundred projects. He also worked on a short film challenge with the Gates Foundation.
Home
After a stint at the Redford Center and a year’s sabbatical, he came back to Michigan in 2018 and has been building things up north ever since. He led the Michigan Legacy Art Park for two and a half years. In 2021 he and Beth Milligan founded the Old Mission Culture Company, the nonprofit behind the festival. He reviews films for the Northern Express and is an arts contributor on Interlochen Public Radio.
He also made a movie. Marqueetown, which he wrote, directed and produced with Jordan Anderson, follows one man’s long campaign to bring Marquette’s historic Nordic theater back to life. It won the work-in-progress award at Fresh Coast’s home festival in Marquette in 2023, premiered in 2024, toured more than thirty cities, and aired on PBS stations across Michigan. It now streams through more than 120 PBS affiliates.
The festival returns to Traverse City from April 29 to May 2, 2027.
An interper’s whole job is to choose a story, cut it to fit the time and put it in front of a room so that it lands. Beyer has done that for Sundance audiences, for public television and now for his neighbors. He learned it in Holland, and Michigan gave him two trophies for it.
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
