The Visit Broken Arrow board met on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at 3:30 PM in the City Hall Council Chamber. Key items included an update on the inaugural Broken Arrow Film Festival, approval of a sponsorship for the Performing Arts Center's Spotlight Series, and a report from the Tourism Director.
Order for visit BA Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's not a cold beer. All right. Action item A under presentation 26-1428. Update uh from the director of the Broken Arrow Film Festival. So this is the last meeting before the film festival, so I thought I would just have Brad Heath come in and talk about how it's going and what to expect. Good afternoon, everyone. Hello. What you have in front of you is our official block schedule for the inaugural Broken Arrow Film Festival. We're very excited about it. The two-day event is set. We're ready to go. We're putting the final touches on all the preparations and announcements that we have yet to make. If you look at the schedule, you'll see both days on there. The first day is Friday, October 2nd, and the second sheet will show you Saturday, October 3rd. We have 30 states represented in the film festival. We have multiple universities in the student category, which was great. From the East Coast to the West Coast, from the University of Texas in Dallas to the big schools here in Oklahoma. It's a pretty good sized list with the student category. We're excited about that. We've got a team coming in from Arkansas. They did a Ghostbusters tribute film, which is really fun. They shot some of it here in Tulsa. So it's got a it's got a Tulsa element to it. But they're bringing in their cast, they're bringing in their director, the composer. Quite a few people are gonna show up for that one. We've got a couple of documentaries that have people bring uh bringing people into town. Some function is coming in from Illinois. It's a military documentary about soldiers who came back from the war in Afghanistan and Iraq as amputees. It's a really good documentary. And uh one called The Long Walk from the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. They're bringing in a group uh to show their film, and it's it's gonna be wonderful to have them as well. We're looking forward to hosting them and showing them broken arrow. Um we have several panels set up, and if you notice in panel number three on Saturday, we've got uh Michaela uh is gonna sit on that one. Hopefully we can talk Aaron into sitting on it as well. Surprise. Um but it's about filming in Broken Arrow and filming in Tulsa. So Meg Gould from uh Tulsa F Mac is gonna sit on on that one and hopefully give filmmakers an opportunity to learn more about broken arrow and what BA has to offer to filmmakers. Um yeah, it's going it's going absolutely wonderful. We do have some event posters that I will pass out to you as well. Um we were able to uh get approximately 24 local businesses to to sign up and be sponsors with us, which is great. Um they're what we call an award sponsor, so as the festival goes, there'll be ad shuffles between the blocks of films with their advertising on it. We've shot some commercials for them as well that have posted on social media and we've got more coming. And they'll have an opportunity to present the award if they wish. Uh but we've got some really cool presenters besides the two on the poster. We've got some local talent and some people who have done a lot of cool things. So uh names you probably won't recognize, but you you might know the face.