Blog: Film festivals

The Norwich Film Festival was recently chosen by The Metro as one of "the top UK film festivals you need to know about", and in 2017 became a BIFA (British Independent Film Awards) qualifying short film festival.

We have been running since 2009 and over the years we have hosted over 75 events and screened over 500 films to the public.

The Norwich Film Festival has an amazing array of celebrity patrons including Stephen Fry, Tim McInnerny, Olivia Colman, Julian Jarrold, Brian Cox & John Collee. We also work hard to recruit industry judges (see below) who are all eager to watch our nominated films.

Our 2018 film judges will only view the NOMINATED Films selected and the Norwich Film Festival will then allocate which film categories that judges will watch.

The 2018 film judges are (subject to work commitments):

- Alfred Molina (World Famous Actor)
- Denise Parkinson (Director of Entertainment at the Telegraph)
- Gavin Humphries (BAFTA nominated and Cannes winning shorts producer)
- Andrea Gibb (BAFTA Nominated Screenwriter)
- Matt Wilkinson (Award Nominated Producer)
- Emma Freud (Script Editor & Associate Producer)
- Eddy Joseph (Two time BAFTA winning Sound Editor)
- Mark Everson (Award winning Editor)
- Ferne Pearlstein (Award winning Director, Cinematography & Producer)
- Andrew Deane (Emmy Winning Producer and Managing Partner at Industry Entertainment)
- Steven Hall (DOP and BAFTA Judge)

As well as screening the selected films to the public, the winning films will also receive an award, a certificate, a cash prize, and a selection of other industry related prizes.
Our social media gained well over 2 million impressions on Twitter alone last year, and we will promote your film to a global audience.

The festival is an event aimed at the talent of film professionals, artists and students, to emerge creativity with the noble diffusion of values and deep thought.

It is the festival with more theaters of release in Catalonia, 10 theaters.
It has an exclusive entrance to the city center, the emblematic Plaza de la Independencia.
It is the oldest festival in Catalonia after Sitges,
All the films in the world are registered.
400 films are screened between feature films, shorts, documentaries, etc.
It has more than six thousand spectators.

The Asian Summer Film Festival wants to present the Asian culture through the popular cinematography produced in the countries of the continent.

The Festival has several categories such as a competitive section, retrospectives, screenings for children and theme nights. Last year, 40 titles from China, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Corea, Japan and India were shown, some of them were World and International festival premieres, European festival premieres or Spanish festival premieres. The 18 films programmed in the official section competed for the Jury Prize, the Lucky Cat Award, given by the audience to the best film in-competition, and the Critics’ Choice Award.

The Monterrey International Film Festival, ficmonterrey, opens its call for the submission of feature films and short films for the selection of its twentieth edition, which will take place from September 25 to October 2, 2024.

https://monterreyfilmfestival.com/20-ficmonterrey/convocatoria/

The Competitive Selection is made up of the following categories:

FEATURE FILMS
International Feature Film — Fiction/Animation*
International Feature Film — Documentary
Mexican Feature Film — Fiction/Animation*
Mexican Feature Film — Documentary

SHORT FILMS
International Short Film — Fiction/Animation*
International Short Film — Documentary
Mexican Short Film — Fiction/Animation*
Mexican Short Film — Documentary
Mexican Student Short Film Competition — Any Genre

*In the case of submitting animations whose content coincides with the documentary, the Selection Committee reserves the right to select it in the most convenient category.

NUEVO LEÓN CATEGORY
Nuevo León Competition — Any Gender
Category made by the Selection Committee, it is not opened as a separate category, but registration is indirect through the Mexican categories —see more in the Regulations through our website.

The registration dates go from the publication of this call, until its closing, on July 7, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. (GMT-6) without any possibility of extension. Feature film works (from 60 minutes onwards) and short films (between 1 and less than 30 minutes in length) will be received through the Festhome platform exclusively.

Selected participants will be notified via email during the first or second week of August and they will be informed of the continuity of the process. The Committee's selection is final. By registering, all participants who are selected agree to send all the required materials in a timely manner, as detailed in the Regulations and as they will be requested from their notification until the closing of the ficmonterrey. The registration of any material in this call confirms the acceptance of it and the attached rules. For this reason, before starting the process, we ask you to READ IN DETAIL the Registration Regulations available through the WEBSITE.

The festival will make public the final list of the films that will make up its competitive Official Selection starting in September 2024 on the Festival's official website: https://monterreyfilmfestival.com/

The ficmonterrey is in a constant search for human narratives that rely on views that emerge from a world in constant movement and transformation, in interconnection and innovation for its selection.

The Festival seeks films with the power to reside in the collective memory of audiences, with the power to move and create dialogue with them.

One of the key interests of the ficmonterrey organizing team is to encourage new perspectives, those who are young not because of their age, but because they are fresh, for remaining critical, for achieving themselves with innovation and venturing into various risks.

The general objective of ficmonterrey is to bring together in Nuevo León an in-person audience, and a virtual one throughout Mexico, before a selection of contemporary Mexican and international cinema created by filmmakers with diverse, fresh, risky, critical, and innovative visions. Likewise, we are interested in providing a training space that promotes the meeting between filmmakers, films and the audience; and activities that promote film production, especially women's and regional ones.

The cultural associations AlchemicartS and Gruppo Augusteo, in collaboration with Tetra Vision Production, are pleased to announce the 15th International Short Film Festival, "CORTISONANTI 2024," renowned for its innovation and well-organized filmmaking workshops in Naples, Italy.

The Melbourne Underground Film Festival (M.U.F.F.) is a cutting edge premiere showcase for Independent cinema from around the world. It is known for its radical, adventurous and iconoclastic programming decisions, in addition to its support of different voices from independent, alternative, underground and student filmmakers worldwide. The festival focuses on both Australian and International cinema. M.U.F.F. plays many shorts every year and a lot of features, plus an exciting array of documentaries and curated retrospectives. M.U.F.F. is an essential forum for new cinema that will look beyond production values, and find the hidden talent within. M.U.F.F. has been the launching board and incubator for many talented and famous filmmakers including James Wan, Scott Ryan, Jenna Fisher, Jim VanBebber, Bruce LaBruce, Peter Christopherson, Stuart Simpson, Shannon Young, Kel Dolen, Steven Kastrissios, Ivan Kavanagh, Mark Savage, Anna Brownfield, Patrick Hughes, Jeremey DeCeglie, Gregory Pakis and many, many others.

Ars Independent Festival 2019 will be the 9th multimedia festival of film, animation, video games and music videos. The upcoming edition will take place in Katowice, between the 24th and 29th of September 2019.

The festival is searching for what’s cool in young, debuting, contemporary audio-visual culture. It’s not afraid to watch videos with 27 views on YouTube, it’s missing the “least popular” sorting option on itch.io and considers Festival Scope Pro decidedly “too mainstream”.

The heart of the festival are four international competitions, in which the audience decides about the awarding of prizes. The Black Horse of Film (feature films from all over the world) and the Black Horse of Animation (short features) present the cinematographic debuts by directors from the entire world, often as their Polish premieres. The Black Horse of Video Games and the Black Horse of Music Video are devoted to new games and music videos.

Additionally, every year festivalgoers are treated to: screenings of films, animations and music videos, video game exhibitions, virtual reality and new technologies, discussion panels and Q&As with artists, concerts, live acts and musical afterparties.

In previous years, the festival hosted a variety of artists from all over the world, including Béla Tarr, Nina Menkes, Phil Mulloy, Laila Pakalnina, Bruce LaBruce, Tami Tamaki, Stephen „M.O.O.N.” Gilarde, Jakuba Dvorský, Mariola Brillowska, Piotr Dumała, Arkadiusz Jakubik, Bodo Kox, Łukasz Barczyk, Sos Sosowski, Wiktor Stribog and Władysław Komendarek.

The event is organized by the culture institution Katowice the City of Gardens and the City of Katowice.

Conscious Cartoons is a non-profit competitive international animation festival, and the first of its kind solely focused on short works (15 min. or less) addressing social issues. These issues can be personal, local, national, global or historical in scope but should reflect broader humanistic themes such as peace, justice, love, responsibility, consciousness, and the joy and pain of the human condition. The aim of this festival is to open eyes, hearts, and minds, through the uniquely transcendent medium of animation.
Please go to our website for further details consciouscartoons.org

Along with promoting greater awareness of social causes, the festival celebrates and supports independent animators by offering an unprecedented amount in cash prizes ($20,000) in multiple categories.

The festival is held September 14-16, 2018 on Vashon Island, WA, a jewel in the Puget Sound known for its vibrant art culture, progressive attitudes, and stunning natural beauty. Be warned: you may not want to leave.

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.

Fifth shorts festival of Canovelles

Ulsan Ulju Mountain Film Festival(UMFF) is the first international mountain film festival in South Korea, dedicated to presenting and promoting films & culture dealing with mountains, adventure, exploration, nature, and the environment. The festival also provides an opportunity for filmmakers and mountaineers to meet and exchange ideas through seminars, events, screenings, and social gatherings.

The 9th UMFF will be held in Ulsan & Ulju, South Korea in autumn, 2024.

The 16th annual SiciliAmbiente Film Festival will take on July 15-20, 2024.

The aim of SiciliAmbiente Film Festival is to promote independent cinema and documentary cinema, and to encourage creative exchange and networking among the directors.

This Festival is organized and sponsored by Demetra Produzioni SAS and CANTIERE 7 Cultural Association, and made possible by public and private partners and sponsors who share in the same ethical principles of the Festival.
Films dealing with the following themes may participate: Environment, Anthropology, Human Rights, Biodiversity, War, Integration, Civil Rights, Sustainable Development and the Relationship between Man and the Environment.

The Festival is divided into different sections:

Documentary Film contest (minimum rt: 31 minutes)

Fiction Feature Film contest (minimum rt: 70 minutes)

Short Film contest for Fiction and Documentary shorts (maximum rt: 31 minutes)

Animated short film contest (maximum rt: 31 minutes)

Overview of documentaries, fiction, short films and several tributes, retrospectives, seminars and panel discussions
The Selection Committee will choose based on the quality of writing and images and the general use of a creative language identifying artistic documentary cinema.

DOCUMENTARY CONTEST – FICTION FILM CONTEST - SHORT FILM CONTEST - ANIMATED FILM CONTEST

Submission requirements

Documentaries (31’ or more), Feature films (70’ or more), Short and Animated films (31’ or less) of any nationality may be submitted for the selection process, provided that they were completed after January 1, 2023.

If selected, the format for the projection of the film may be:
· Unencrypted DCP
· Blu-ray DVD
· Apple ProRes File
· File H264

Other formats must be approved by the Festival Management.
Screening fees may not be requested and will not be paid for the contests.

Films in any language other than Italian must be subtitled in English or Italian and, if selected for the final phase of competition, they must be sent to the festival with the requested presentation materials and the English dialogue list.

Films to be presented in the Short film and Animated film sections must be shorter than 31 minutes or they will be excluded.

No screening fees can be requested by the representatives of the films submitted for the contest.
The Festival may choose to invite selected films into the contest.

Some of the films not selected for the short film and animated film contests may be selected for a non-competitive section.

With twenty-two years of existence, (the first edition was in 1997) AVANCA Film Festival was awarded first place in 2011 contest of the support film festivals sponsored by ICA / Ministry of Culture.

An additional thematic programming has happened over all these years, giving space to screening of significant works of contemporary cinema appropriately framed in concerns and / or well-defined objectives.

The AVANCA is known as a space for workshops led by personalities of world cinema, and being more than a "master class", has allowed a unique cinema practice. Every year we have always 6 or 7 workshops, bringing together participants from all over Europe. The media have written that this is the largest European area of professional workshops in the field of cinema.

AVANCA is the only festival that congregates a Cinema International Competition, works from the television area, video and new supports of multimedia, with a special concern of exhibit the best world productions done in each category.
Since the first edition, the festival only accepts unprecedented films in Portugal.

The World Premiere competition is unique in our country and was only possible because Avanca became a passage point of unpublished authors and movies with great quality. Films that have their world premiere in the festival, independently of the submitted category, are also participating in the World Premiere Competition.
AVANCA is the Portuguese festival with the highest percentage of worldwide unpublished movies that find here their first showing.

In 2020 Edition, Avanca will bring for the first time the VR Competition, where films in virtual reality 360°, narrative or experimental (but with no interactivity) are allowed.

Since 2010, we have organized the international film conference AVANCA | CINEMA, becoming the most important conference in the field of cinema in the Iberian Peninsula. This conference brings together speakers and participants from around the world.
Thematic exhibitions, editions of books, bibliographic presentations and various projects have marked these last 10 years of AVANCA with the quality that compels the festival and the participants obviously require.

Dear friends and friends:

Once again we have the honor of inviting you to be part of our festival for which we look for films of any duration, theme or origin that, embracing the tools of real cinema, represent diverse points of view on the contemporary human experience.

In this version we are once again a face-to-face space, returning our hearts to the collective bodies of the desert. AricaDoc was born as a path to explore alternatives to the competition and commodification that industrial logics impose on the cinematographic arts.

Promoting a sensitive and political meeting based on the active search for new ways to feel our relationship with the world around us.

We are deeply grateful to each and everyone who has joined the communities of audiences of the festival from distant territories, thinking of them and them is that at least part of the program will be available on an online viewing platform, for access from Peru, Bolivia and Chile.

For this year the activities will be concentrated between August 28 and September 9. Being this call open between May 13 and June 10, through FESTHOME or as a direct application by registering your films and completing the application form available on the site aricadoc.cl

Thanking you in advance for your kind participation.

Kindly say goodbye
Arica Doc Team

MDOC – Melgaço International Documentary Film Festival will select for 2024, documentaries under the themes of identity, memory and border. All films must express the author's point of view on aspects related to social, individual, cultural and identity issues.

Meraki International Film Fest aims to promote culture Film world through audiovisual works, discovering those innovative proposals in this field.

Among the most important Italian art film festivals, TOHORROR FILM FEST starts from cinema and then explores all possible means of communication, with the purpose of analysing contemporary society through the deforming lenses provided by the fantastic and horror culture. Thus, through the young authors’ videos and the films made by more expert directors, the meetings, the theatrical performances, the concerts, the art and comics exhibitions, we are enabled to to interpret reality, filtering it through a most wild imagination.

An international film festival held in Birmingham, England, showcasing and recognising talent on a world stage.

It will run though November and include features, shorts, documentaries and music videos on our main theatre screen, as well support events with special guests.

All filmmakers who's work is being shown will 3 tickets for the screening of their own film.

Distributors, producers and press from all over the world will be on hand to view the films screened and there will be the chance to network with them at the festival too. Many of the industry’s top companies and film schools will also be in attendance offering advice on education and career opportunities.

Other events and networking opportunities will be announced closer to the date. These will include seminars, Q&As, conventions and memorabilia expos.

There will be a high calibre panel of special guest judges, from various areas of the industry, who will review the nominees’ entries and select the winners at the festival’s closing event. The award ceremony will be held at a high-profile venue in the city and be an open ticket event.

The International Inonu University Short Film Festival, which will be held from April 15th to 18th, 2019, welcomes the film lovers in the 12th year ...