San Jose’s Short Film Festival Returns to Santana Row for Its 18th Year

The San Jose International Short Film Festival will occupy Cinemark CinéArts at Santana Row from Thursday, October 22, through Sunday, October 25. Organizers are calling it the largest edition yet, with more than 150 shorts from around the world packed into more than 20 screening blocks. MovieMaker has listed SJSFF among the top 50 festivals worth the entry fee. For four days the recliner seats on Olsen Drive become the city’s window onto work that rarely gets a commercial run.

Thursday used to mean opening night only. This year a new Thursday Pass adds three afternoon blocks before the 7:30 p.m. premiere: And So It Begins at 2 p.m. (drama, comedy, animation, world cinema), A Brave New World at 3 p.m. (avant-garde comedy and drama), and World Cinema One at 4:30 p.m. (seven foreign-language shorts). The same pass covers opening night. Later days split into familiar lanes: two comedy programs including Make ’Em Laugh After Dark, science fiction under The World Beyond, suspense under I’ve Got a Bad Feeling About This, plus extra world cinema, documentary, animation, and family blocks. Filmmaker Q&As and nightly receptions sit around the screenings.

A single block ticket is listed at $10 to $15. Day passes that cover every program on one calendar day run $30 to $50. The $175 VIP All-Access pass unlocks every block, the opening-night afterparty, the VIP lounge, a festival shirt, the awards screening, and a commemorative lanyard. Guest of Honor details were still pending as of mid-September.

The theater itself is 4K DCP with surround sound, which is more than most shorts ever see outside a festival. Eighteen years in, SJSFF remains one of the most unique movie experiences of the year. Passes and the full block schedule are at https://sjsff.com/tickets/.

OpenAI Looking at a Power-Heavy Office in San Jose

OpenAI has been circling a 70,000-square-foot building at 2950 Zanker Road in North San Jose, a box whose real prize is not the floor plate but the 19 megawatts of electrical capacity already wired into it. People familiar with the talks said a lease with landlord Peninsula Land & Capital may already be signed. OpenAI did not comment. Roger Fields’ firm bought the property in 2024 after Electric Hydrogen had poured extra power into a site that already sat on a fat electrical feed.

That feed is why the rent under discussion was reported above $6 per square foot per month, more than double the recent asking average for North San Jose research-and-development space. Brokers have been listing ordinary R&D product in the low-to-mid twos. A tenant willing to pay triple that rate is not shopping for cubicles. Colliers has marketed the same address as high-performance industrial space with lab rooms, a data-center designation, five grade-level doors, a fenced yard of nearly 21,000 square feet, and 19 megawatts available, language aimed at hyperscale computing and heavy manufacturing rather than a conventional office user.

North San Jose has spent decades as a semiconductor and R&D corridor along Zanker, First Street, and the airport fringe. Vacancy in the submarket has been elevated while companies handed back older campuses, yet the buildings that already hold serious power have not sat idle. Figure AI, Credo, Archer Aviation, and others have taken large blocks nearby. The same shortage of ready megawatts that pushed Bloom Energy and Heron Power into expansion mode is now pulling AI names toward industrial shells instead of glass campuses. OpenAI has also been linked to a much larger Mountain View office deal; a Zanker lease would be a different kind of footprint, smaller in people and larger in watts.

San Jose officials have treated data-center and high-load users as a tax and utility revenue play when the projects stay inside existing industrial districts. Nineteen megawatts is modest next to the multi-gigawatt campuses OpenAI has announced in Ohio and Georgia, which is part of the point. A 70,000-square-foot building already on the grid can come online without a new substation fight. If the lease closes, North San Jose will have another reminder that the next wave of Silicon Valley demand is arriving first where the wires already are.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Symphony San Jose Opens Its 25th Anniversary Season With America at 250

The California Theatre at 345 South First Street will open Symphony San Jose’s 25th anniversary season on Saturday, October 3 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, October 4 at 2:30 p.m. The program, titled THE NEW WORLD: America at 250, ties the orchestra’s own milestone to the nation’s 250th year through three works that travel from the mythic West to a brand-new Bay Area premiere and on to Dvořák’s most famous symphony. The same season also marks the California Theatre’s 100th anniversary and 150 years since San Jose first heard an orchestral concert, so the weekend lands with extra weight for anyone who cares about Downtown San Jose’s cultural life.

Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid Suite still does what it has done since 1938: pull folk tunes, open-sky harmonies, and gunslinger swagger into a few tightly scored scenes. After that, pianist Joyce Yang will give the Bay Area its first hearing of Jonathan Leshnoff’s Rhapsody on America, a work Symphony San Jose co-commissioned. Leshnoff wrote the rhapsody as a lyrical, rhythmically restless meditation on the American spirit, and Yang has already introduced it elsewhere in the commissioning consortium. The evening then turns to Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” composed during his years in the United States and still the piece most people reach for when they want landscape, longing, and a big-hearted finish in the same hour.

Ken-David Masur will conduct both performances. The German-born American maestro, recently concluding a long Milwaukee Symphony tenure and a frequent guest with major U.S. orchestras, brings a clear beat and a taste for programs that mix familiar landmarks with living composers. Yang, a Van Cliburn silver medalist known for color and power at the keyboard, sits at the center of the Leshnoff. Together they give the anniversary opener a guest list that matches the occasion.

Saturday night adds an Opening Night Fanfare before the concert: a complimentary sip of champagne, live music, ballet dancers, and extra performances in the lobby as the house fills. Music Notes talks start one hour before each concert inside the auditorium. Adult ticket buyers can add guests age 17 and under at half price; single tickets run $35 to $125, fees included. The whole program lasts about one hour and 50 minutes with intermission.

Tickets and youth pricing details are at www.symphonysanjose.org or 408.286.2600.

Kids Day in the Park Fills Plaza de César Chávez This Afternoon

Bay Area Parent’s Kids Day in the Park lands on the same Downtown lawn that hosts Music in the Park, and the gates open at 11 a.m. today, Sunday, September 20. Entry is through the San Carlos Street side of Plaza de César Chávez, next to the Quetzalcoatl statue. Advance tickets cost nothing. A walk-up ticket at the door runs $20, so reserve a free pass before leaving the house if that is still an option.

Oakland’s Alphabet Rockers headline the stage. Kaitlin McGaw and Tommy Soulati Shepherd built the group in 2007 around hip-hop that talks to kids without talking down to them, and the catalog now carries both a Grammy for Best Children’s Music Album and an Emmy. The set is the musical center of a day built for strollers and short attention spans: bounce houses, booths from local organizations and businesses, food trucks, and whatever other activities the organizers packed onto the grass.

A few house rules will save a wasted trip. Outside food, drinks, and water bottles stay in the car. The festival is mostly cashless. Pets other than service animals are out. Chairs are not allowed; blankets smaller than 6 by 8 feet can go on the lawn. Bags should be a clear tote no larger than 12 by 12 by 8 inches or a small clutch. Strollers and wheelchairs are fine, and the plaza is ADA accessible if you flag limited seating in advance. Re-entry is not offered, so treat the afternoon as one continuous stay. Parking sits in nearby garages, including CityView Plaza off Park Avenue and the underground lot at 55 West San Fernando Street.

Downtown San Jose does not get many Sundays that combine a free kids’ festival with a Grammy-winning act on the city’s most familiar outdoor stage. Grab the free ticket, pack a small blanket, and let the bounce houses and the Rockers do the rest. Reserve passes and read the full bag policy at https://www.caltix.com/e/kids-in-the-park-2026/tickets.

Ignite Takes Over the Old Sushi Confidential Corner in San Pedro Square

The sign that once pointed San Pedro Square visitors toward Sushi Confidential or the SAP Center has been covered. In its place, Ignite has already started a soft opening at 26 North San Pedro Street, two weeks after the sushi house served its last rolls at the end of August. Owner Hima Adusumilli is betting the same patio that fed concert and hockey crowds can hold a different kind of night: fire-grilled skewers, smash burgers, wings, bowls, and a cocktail list meant to keep people at the table after dinner.

The room runs about 3,700 square feet inside with a patio of roughly 3,500 square feet opening onto the car-free square. Head chef Felipe Chen is running an early menu that includes an Ignite Smash Burger, loaded nachos, truffle Parmesan fries, balsamic wings, and seafood baskets, with more dishes still arriving. Soft-opening hours have been dinner-first: 4 to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, and 3 to 9 p.m. Sunday. A grand opening is set for October 2. The bar poured 11 cocktails and 15 beer taps at launch, and Adusumilli has said nightlife, DJs, and security will follow once the kitchen settles.

About 15 people work the floor and line so far, including eight who stayed on from Sushi Confidential. That continuity matters on a block where regulars already know the faces. Randy Musterer, who built the Sushi Confidential group, framed the exit as a shift toward catering, live action stations, hand-roll bars, and new restaurants elsewhere in the Bay Area, not a retreat from San Jose. The Willow Glen dining room, Campbell and Morgan Hill spots, and the SAP Center stand all remain. Corporate events simply grew faster than one downtown dining room could serve.

A second change is forming a few doors away. The Silk Route Bar and Kitchen will take the two-story, 6,800-square-foot space at 17 North San Pedro Street, the former Olla Cocina site that later hosted a short-lived Bar Tako pop-up and a cancelled Santos Mexican steakhouse plan. Jasbir Singh and Mandeep Jandir, who already run The Brit Sports Pub around the corner, have put nearly $1 million into an upscale Indian dining room and about 25 jobs. They have aimed the concept at a gap Downtown San Jose still has: a full-service Indian kitchen with a real cocktail program, not another quick lunch counter.

Turnover on this stretch can look like loss until the next kitchen lights the patio. San Pedro Square still functions as one of the few places in the city where dinner, a late second round, and a walkable crowd occupy the same block. If Ignite holds the night and Silk Route fills the Indian fine-dining hole this fall, the square will have traded one long-running sushi house for two new reasons to stay out. Hours and menus for Ignite are at www.eatatignite.com. The grand opening is October 2.

Source: SVBJ 

San Jose Reports a Sharp Drop in Homelessness

City Hall released a new estimate this week that the unsheltered population fell about 32 percent in 18 months, from 5,477 people in February 2025 to 3,702 in August 2026. Mayor Matt Mahan tied the change to encampment cleanups, no-re-encampment zones, and a fast buildout of interim rooms: motels, tiny homes, and other emergency beds. ABC7 heard from some residents near Arena Green and the SAP Center who said they now see fewer people living outdoors, even as they added that the crisis has not left the city.

The numbers come from UrbanLogiq, a third-party model that folds in 15 data streams rather than waiting for the federal Point-in-Time count every two years. Those streams include outreach logs, police and fire calls, transportation counts of lived-in vehicles, and Homeless Management Information System records. Officials say the same model counted about 1,500 more unsheltered people than the January 2025 PIT figure of 3,959, which is why they treat the older snapshot as an undercount. The plan is to refresh the estimate every quarter so programs can shift instead of guessing for two years at a stretch.

Housing staff also pointed to capacity that did not exist a short while ago. Reports this week put newly created interim units around 1,000, while a September 15 council briefing described a wider portfolio of roughly 1,820 units and more than 2,200 beds across 22 sites. Lived-in vehicles tracked by the city fell from 960 in fall 2024 to 385 by spring 2026. Resident surveys moved in the same direction: the share of people who named homelessness as the single biggest thing San Jose should change dropped from a peak of 40 percent to 20 percent.

Skeptics asked whether the street feels that different. Advocate Shaunn Cartwright told ABC7 the 32 percent cut does not match what she sees day to day and noted that unhoused deaths last year hit 160, with 2026 on a similar pace. The Mercury News reported that Santa Clara County has not independently reviewed the UrbanLogiq model. The next official PIT count is not due until early 2027, so federal funders may still lean on the older method. City leaders themselves said the people still outside are often the hardest to reach, with addiction and mental health needs that interim beds alone will not settle.

A smaller outdoor population would matter for parks, storefronts, and the everyday walk through Downtown San Jose. It would also matter for the thousands who moved inside if those rooms stay funded and lead somewhere more permanent. The next quarterly run of the model will show whether the line keeps falling or levels off.

Source: ABC News

Sprouts Claims the Old Orchard Supply on Cottle, Opening Early 2028

Sprouts Farmers Market signed a lease for the empty Orchard Supply Hardware box at 5651 Cottle Road. The grocer told the Business Journal it expects to open in early 2028. A public hearing on the remodel is set for September 15. Dollinger Properties bought the 4.3-acre site for $7.3 million in 2025 after the hardware store went dark in 2018.

The work would add about 5,568 square feet to the old building, tear out 1,200 square feet of mezzanine, recut the floor into four tenant spaces, and redo the parking circulation. One of those spaces is slated for a preschool or daycare. Sprouts would not name the operator. Earlier city files had floated a Goddard preschool and a fitness tenant; those plans appear to have shifted toward grocery plus child care.

This would be Sprouts’ sixth store inside San Jose city limits and one of more than twenty in the Bay Area. The lot sits inside Orchard Town and Country, the outdoor center that already holds Baskin-Robbins, Greek Spot, and Castillo’s Mexican Restaurant. Safeway and Target sit close enough that another grocer has to earn the trip. T&T just opened at Westgate. Gus’s is aiming at the old Whole Foods in Los Gatos for 2027. South San Jose is getting the same grocery scramble as the west side.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Hines Files a Plan to Reopen Storefronts on Paseo de San Antonio

Texas-based Hines Interests has asked San Jose to consider a two-track makeover of 150 South First Street, the two-story block that faces South First, South Second, and the Paseo de San Antonio. Eleven empty ground-floor spaces totaling about 31,000 square feet would become Paseo Place. Behind those storefronts, the firm also wants to modernize a data center that sat mostly idle after older equipment went out of date. Hines paid roughly $59.6 million for the 179,800-square-foot building in 2021, its first Downtown San Jose purchase. The site once carried the Pavilion mall name, a late-1980s retail bet that never quite became the Rodeo Drive city leaders hoped for.

Outdoor dining, shade, and new lighting would land on the Paseo. New materials, signs, and a brightly lit clock tower next to the complex are meant to pull eyes toward the walkway that already links the plaza formerly known as Plaza de César Chávez, the Hammer Theatre, and San Jose State. Ownership says it will recruit restaurants and retailers with incentives rather than wait for tenants to wander in. Nearby successes on or near the same paseo, including Scott’s Seafood, Eos & Nyx, and Urban Putt, show the corridor can hold a crowd when the rooms stay open.

The data center piece would be larger and quieter. Equipment installed about 29 years ago would give way to a facility with high-density cooling and tighter emissions controls on emergency generators. Power capacity would rise from about 5 megawatts to 40. City officials have treated new, fully running data centers as a tax source, with estimates in the range of $3.4 million to $6.8 million a year in utility and property taxes for a completed project. Santa Clara County already ranks among the country’s busiest data-center markets. Hines argues the public face of the block would stay retail and pedestrian, even if the floors above and behind the glass do something else.

None of this has a green light yet. The filing, PDC26-016, seeks Early Consideration under the city’s Innovative Project Pathway Program, a route for projects that claim an unusual public benefit even when they sit awkwardly against existing zoning. Early Consideration is feedback, not approval. Council has used the same pathway on other Downtown pairings of data halls and street-level activity. Vacancy remains the everyday problem: more than 70 empty Downtown storefronts turned up in a recent count, and commercial emptiness has hovered near a quarter of the inventory.

A revived Paseo would give students, theatergoers, and office workers a reason to linger between First and Second instead of cutting through a string of dark windows. If the city can extract both a livelier walkway and a steadier tax check from the same parcel, Downtown San Jose gains something it has needed since the Pavilion era ended. The proposal still has to survive public review. For more on the filing and the city’s large-energy project list, see the City of San Jose Planning Division page for data centers and the September 11, 2026 Mercury News report.

Source: The Mercury News

Chagee Adds a Westgate Shop This Winter After Valley Fair

Chagee Modern Tea House will open a second Northern California store at 1600 Saratoga Avenue inside Westgate Center this winter. The suite is 1,543 square feet, next to the new T&T Supermarket. The larger Valley Fair shop, about 2,500 square feet, is still slated for fall and is billed as the regional flagship. Two San Jose locations in one season puts the brand on both sides of West San Jose without a long drive between them.

The chain already runs most of its California shops in the south. These two bring the state count to 11. Loyalty members account for more than half of company revenue, and the Valley Fair room is supposed to carry the full spend-based program and the custom digital layer. Westgate may or may not get the same build-out. Either way, a tea counter next to T&T is a different errand than a mall destination at Valley Fair.

Westgate’s own marketing cites a daytime population of 197,254 inside three miles and an average household income of $246,773. That is the math behind putting a premium tea brand beside a large Asian grocer instead of waiting for another downtown lease. Saratoga Avenue already has Gong Cha in the same center. Chagee is aiming higher on price and presentation. No opening date besides “winter” has been posted. 

Brand site: https://chagee.us/

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal

Five Casts of Shrek Jr. Take Over Hoover Theater from September 25

Playful People Productions will run Shrek the Musical Jr. at Historic Hoover Theater, 1635 Park Avenue, from September 25 through October 4. Two age bands share the stage across the ten days: performers five to twelve in one set of casts, twelve to seventeen in the other. Shannon Santandrea and Emily Pennington co-direct. The score is Jeanine Tesori’s, the book David Lindsay-Abaire’s, shortened for young companies but still built around an ogre who would rather stay in his swamp than rescue a princess for Lord Farquaad.

Five named casts split the calendar so families can pick a time that actually works. Castle Cast opens Friday the 25th at 7 p.m., then plays Saturday the 26th at 3 and Sunday the 27th at 11. Duloc Cast takes Saturday the 26th at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., plus Sunday the 27th at 3. The second weekend belongs to Parfait, Swamp, and Onion, with Friday the 2nd starting at 5 and 8 p.m. and Sunday the 4th stretching from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Check the ticket page before buying; each listing names its cast.

Tickets sit at $20 for youth twelve and under, $23 for students thirteen to seventeen, and $28 for adults. The City of San José Cultural Affairs grant and SVCreates money, in partnership with Santa Clara County, help keep those prices in family range. Playful People has worked out of Hoover since the company formed in 2010 and became a 501(c)(3) in 2017. The same shop still runs adult classes and multi-generational shows when a script allows relatives on the same bill.

Tickets: https://www.playfulpeople.org/tickets

Company info: https://www.playfulpeople.org or (408) 878-5362