WATERVILLE — Ken Eisen has been a founder, a film programmer and an honoree. Most of all he’s been an audience member.

Eisen, 73, will be awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award Friday at the 28th annual Maine International Film Festival in Waterville. The festival, which runs all this week across three theaters at the Maine Film Center and one at the Waterville Opera House, is showing films from Maine and more than 30 countries, including France, Nigeria and Cambodia.

Strolling around Castonguay Square in a patterned fish shirt and cargo shorts in early July, Eisen watched festival preparations begin outside the Paul J. Schupf Art Center. Children were painting in the adjoining park, and a man set up the tent where festivalgoers will line up for each screening.

Eisen helped make downtown Waterville the arts and film hub it is today, but he would never tell you that.

Born in Staten Island, New York, to cinephile parents, Eisen spent his teenage years in Arlington, Virginia, escaping to the movies. He attended Colby College in 1969 and met fellow student Gail Chase at the school’s film society. The pair moved to Washington, D.C., where he said they quickly tired of the trappings of urban theaters.

“We were just kind of mainlining films,” Eisen said. “And said: ‘OK, we’re going to come back to Waterville and open a movie theater.’ Which was a ridiculous idea.”

In the 1970s, Waterville was a largely working-class city of about 18,000 with a private college up on the hill. Colby and downtown Waterville existed on different planes; Eisen and Chase didn’t want their theater to be an outgrowth of that tension.

They combined forces with local filmmaker Stu Silverstein, Colby audiovisual librarian Lea Girardin and Alan Sanborn, who was projecting films on the wall of a local municipal building. The unlikely group pooled their money — totaling $15,000 — and converted a former beverage warehouse into a makeshift cinema in Waterville’s Railroad Square.

In October 1978, Railroad Square Cinema opened with a showing of “Casablanca.” Films were cast from 16mm projectors salvaged from a surplus store; the projectors got so hot that the projectionist had to wear a helmet, goggles and a bathing suit. Rumors floated that someone once ran it nude.

The theater burned down in 1995; they rebuilt, this time with Colby’s support. At concessions, the group claimed to sell the “best popcorn in the known universe” — a slogan that carried on when Railroad Square Cinema became the Maine Film Center in 2012.

The five friends argued every time they had to pick a movie, but that was half the fun. Sanborn preferred horror films, Girardin wanted to show films from Maine, Silverstein liked documentaries, and Chase and Eisen favored foreign films.

There was only one way to settle things, said Sanborn and Girardin, who both sported Railroad Square T-shirts as they swapped stories at the Maine Film Center in June. After weeks of debate over what to show, they said, everyone had chosen a film to screen at the theater. Eisen’s grossed the highest.

“Ken was always the most movie knowledgeable,” Sanborn said. “He was always reading Variety and The New York Times, he knew what was opening.”

“He knew what was in New York,” Girardin added. “And none of us knew that.”

Eisen became the theater’s official film programmer. He traveled to film festivals in Canada and claimed to watch seven films a day, though he only stayed through one or two. The first 15 minutes of a movie told him everything he needed to know. He said Marvel movies were worst of all.

“It’s a big filmmaking world out there, and it’s bigger than ever because it’s easier to make a film,” Eisen said. “It’s not easier to make a good film.”

In 1984, Eisen co-founded Waterville’s Shadow Distribution, which releases specialized films to theaters across the country. He also taught film courses at Colby, the University of Southern Maine and the University of Maine at Augusta.

At the time, no film festivals were in Maine and few were in New England. The group founded the Maine International Film Festival in 1998 to bring international, independent and revival films to the state.

Back then, Eisen was the festival’s sole programmer; today, he is on a team that receives submissions from across the world. If a film is new, it must never have been shown in Maine, released in theaters or distributed on a streaming platform. Retrospective films are often shown in honor of an acclaimed guest receiving an award at the festival.

The founders gave the first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award to Dutch director Jos Stelling in 1999 with the hope of attracting a larger audience to the theater. Stelling had one stipulation, Eisen said.

“He stood up on stage when we gave him the award,” Eisen said. “And he said, “Well, I’m only 51 and I’m not done, so can we make this a midlife achievement award?'”

The name stuck.

This year, “Children of Men” actor Clive Owen will be honored with a Mid-Life Achievement award at 7 p.m. Tuesday at a screening of “Croupier,” with a reception at Front + Main to follow. Six of his films will be screened throughout the festival.

Eisen will receive his Lifetime Achievement Award on July 18 at a 7 p.m. screening of “The Long Goodbye” directed by Robert Altman. A ceremony will take place before the screening at the Waterville Opera House.

In keeping with MIFF tradition, both award winners will be presented with a moose trophy crafted in their likeness. A Maine artist is given a reference photo to ensure the moose’s clothes, props and hairstyle are true to life.

Eisen will be celebrated for nearly 50 years of curating and programming films in Waterville. He feels honored to receive the award, albeit slightly self-conscious walking the same stage as many talented directors, actors and filmmakers before him.

“I appreciate it,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t. I really do. It just feels a little awkward to me.”

Mike Perreault, executive director of the Maine Film Center, said the award is used to lift up any filmmaker who has made important contributions to the film world.

“We use the term filmmaker really broadly,” Perreault said. “And I consider Ken to be a filmmaker, especially through his work as president of Shadow Distribution, he has helped a lot of films reach audiences not only across America but around the world. And I think that is a service to the independent cinema that we’re really excited to celebrate.”

Eisen’s award ceremony will be attended by the five Railroad Square Cinema founders, most of whom still live in Waterville. Girardin said they should probably “make a big cake or something” to celebrate Eisen, his once-ridiculous dream to open a movie theater and the five decades of friendship that followed.

“We argued incessantly, but it’s not like we didn’t all get along,” Girardin said. “Always.”

Eisen will probably never take credit for shaping Waterville’s cinema landscape. He will, however, boast about his place in the community.

“I’ve had a really bright life here,” he said. “I feel lucky to have had it. I feel lucky to be part of this community, and hope I can contribute something to it still.”