The Lake Placid Film Forum has kept up a good level of quality in recent years, with a variety of good, interesting, thought-provoking movies.

Moving the festival from June to October, starting this year, makes sense to us. When the weather is nice and warm, it’s a hard sell to have people spend prime weekend time inside at the movies. Also, we appreciate the Adirondack Film Society’s explanation that an October event will follow the circuit of other big film festivals and therefore help the Lake Placid event get fresher material. Plus, June, before school lets out, draws fewer tourists than other summer months, and Lake Placid still can get a fair number of visitors in October — more than some people realize.

The Film Society’s latest decision, to change the event’s name from Lake Placid Film Forum to Lake Placid Film Festival, makes less sense to us. To us, “festival” isn’t original enough to be a particularly strong brand. It’s fine, but so is “forum,” which also has a degree of uniqueness. Either way, there’s something to be said for consistency when it comes to branding. The Film Society’s weakness, admittedly, has been a lack of promotion. Changing the brand name slightly won’t make up for a lack of branding activity.

Then again, we may be wrong. We remember thinking it was a bad idea for the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks in Tupper Lake to change its name to The Wild Center. In fact, that brand proved to be wildly successful.

Forum or festival, we enjoy attending and look forward to seeing this locally run event continue and grow.