Video: Talking 2025 Wisconsin Film Festival with Josiah Wampfler

At a medium shot, three people sit in a conference room in a triangular-like formation at a large tan table. Two of them, sitting at the left and center, are turned towards the host, who sits at the right. They all have paper notes in front of them. The table consumes the entire foreground of the frame. — *Sara Batkie (left), Grant Phipps (center), and Josiah Wampfler (right) chat in one of the conference rooms at* Tone Madison‘s coworking space.

A collaborative episode with OCA Media after recovering from festival fatigue in the wake of the 27th annual event, which was held from April 3 through 10.

The comedown after the Wisconsin Film Festival can hit hard. Some of us may need to take a few days off from the movie binge to collect their thoughts and jot down some rousing notes or experiential rankings. Then again, others may want to continue chasing that marathon-viewing high the annual event in April fosters and head right back to the theaters. One thing is universal, though: a desire for discussion.

In lieu of a compilatory play-by-play diary or a personal essay on the Wisconsin Film Festival—approaches we’ve been taking in different forms for the past few years in our post-fest coverage—I wanted to try something a little different this year, for the 27th annual edition, in the spirit of our on-hold podcast collaborations with Four Star Video Rental. I reached out to programming manager at Oregon Community Access (OCA) Media, Josiah Wampfler, who solo-hosts the film segment Two Tickets Please!, to see if he would be interested in a cooperative wrap-up within his particular framework. He graciously accepted.

OCA Media is a local non-profit public access station serving the Oregon, Wisconsin, area. Wampfler has been with the station and hosting Two Tickets Please! since early 2021, winning multiple prizes at Wisconsin Community Media’s Best of the Midwest Media Fest. The OCA Media library and Wampfler’s recurring segment are accessible through the station’s YouTube page as well as on Spectrum and TDS channels.

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Author and film contributor Sara Batkie joined Wampfler and me at Tone Madison‘s coworking space on Friday, April 18, to record this 39-minute segment, with technical assistance from OCA Media executive director Paul Zwicker. We talked about our history of attending (and volunteering with) the Wisconsin Film Festival, logistics of the 2025 edition, what films may have let us down, and what we found inspiring or ripe for discussion.

Though we did not go to the effort to make a painstaking transcription as we have with some of our past podcasts, let us know if that accessibility and convenience is something you’d like to see again with posts containing audio or video. I recognize that YouTube’s built-in “subtitles/closed captions” and auto-generative transcript tools have their flaws or questionable components, but those can serve as rudimentary substitutions.

If you prefer an audio-only version of this discussion, Wampfler also kindly provided a WAV file, which I’ve uploaded to Tone Madison‘s SoundCloud below.

Thanks so much for reading (and watching) our extensive coverage of the Wisconsin Film Festival this season. You can read all our coverage of the fest through the years, dating back to 2016, by visiting this archive link. —Grant Phipps, Film Editor

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