Blog: Film festivals

The New Orleans Film Festival celebrates cinema like only New Orleans can, with brass bands, second-line parades, delicious food, and Mardi Gras beads for every filmmaker. It’s a city known the world over for its hospitality—and it’s also a city that knows how to party. NOFF is no exception, but we never lose sight of what we’re celebrating: exciting new films from bold, passionate storytellers.

Now in its 30th year, the New Orleans Film Festival has grown into an internationally respected annual event. It is one of the few film festivals that is Oscar-qualifying in all three Academy-accredited categories: Narrative Short, Documentary Short, and Animated Short—and it’s been recognized by MovieMaker Magazine as one of the “Top 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee” every year since 2012 (one of only two fests to receive that recognition for seven straight years). Recently MovieMaker placed us on their even more exclusive list of "The 25 Coolest Film Festivals in the World."

The festival’s growing reputation is built upon a commitment to discovering new and diverse voices, with 90% of the lineup coming directly from submissions. Paste Magazine praised the festival for offering “a platform to voices that still fight to be heard,” and indeed, 2018’s festival saw 54% of its films helmed by filmmakers of color and 60% from female filmmakers.

Each year the festival plays host to over 400 filmmakers who come to show their work and lend their artistic voice to the festival gumbo. To encourage filmmaker attendance, NOFF offers lodging to each out-of-town filmmaker and a travel stipend to all feature films in competition. Additionally, the festival works hard to offer guests countless opportunities to connect with the industry presence at the fest, facilitating meetings with distributors like Array, FilmBuff, Magnolia, Paramount, and The Orchard; as well as funders, agencies, broadcasters, and other film organizations like Firelight Media, CAA, Cinereach, Vimeo, Kickstarter, the National Black Programming Consortium, ITVS, Seed&Spark, and HBO. In 2018 we scheduled nearly 400 such meetings. In 2018, we were proud to partner with the Tribeca Film Institute's If/Then Program for the second year in a row to award $20,000 in production assistance to a documentary short in development.

Past attendees and honorees have included Patricia Clarkson, Julie Dash, Chaz Ebert, Rob Reiner, Lupita Nyong’o, Woody Harrelson, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Alfre Woodard, Steve McQueen, Lynn Whitfield, Sarah Paulson, and countless others. We've also hosted special events like a live taping of Slate's Represent podcast with Aisha Harris interviewing Gabourey Sidibe, a conversation with acclaimed filmmakers Julie Dash and Arthur Jafa, and a masterclass with multiple Academy Award®-nominee Agnieszka Holland. Add your name to this impressive list and share your new film with our festival—we would love to see it.