Big Water Film Festival - Bay Theater - Ashland - Wisconsin

14th Annual Festival Free and Online Starting January 7, 2022
See our News section below for more information

Film Entries

You are invited to submit your films, feature films, documentaries, animation, or any other creative film expression for consideration for the upcoming film festival.

The Big Water Film Festival awards the following prizes:  Best Feature, Best Short, Best Short-Short, Best Documentary, Audience Favorite, and the Loren Savitsky Young Filmmaker Award (filmmaker 25 years old or under).  Each award comes with a certificate, a beautiful hand-made award bowl, and $150.

For our 2021 On-line Festival, we will be unable to present an award bowl to the winners, and we will not be having an Audience Favorite Award.

Deadline for submissions for 2022: July 15, 2022.  We will open our Film Freeway site for submittals in early 2022.

We accept submittals only through Film Freeway.  Please click here to link to our Film Freeway site.

 

 

News

We’re going virtual this time around.

The 14th BWFF will be online starting January 7, 2022.  The BWFF Committee feels that the COVID risk is still too great to allow us to safely have an in-person festival.  While vaccination rates in our area are high, so are infections and hospitalizations.  So let’s all be smart and safe and settle in for some good movie viewing at home this winter.

All of our films for the entire festival season will be posted in December.  Then, starting in January, we will make available for viewing an evening’s worth of films each week.  (But you won’t have to watch them all in one evening if you want to spread them out.) We’ll post information on Facebook about our BWFF Films of the Week.  We’ll include blurbs about the films and, where available, still photos and trailers for them, so that you can decide what you’d like to watch.  You’ll have to register through Eventive, a site that provides a secure platform for streaming films, but that will be easy– you’ll just click through from our webpage and put in your name, email address and a password you make up.  And, it will all be free– a way for Big Water to say “thank you” to our community for the sacrifices that you have made during the COVID pandemic.  (Running an on-line festival turns out to not be cheap– so any donations you would like to make will be gratefully accepted.  You’ll be able to do that when you register to watch the films.)

We’ve got films from eleven different countries represented in our line-up, shorts and features, funny films, sad films, films to make you think, films that will leave you feeling good.  We can’t release information on the films just yet, as we are still waiting for some filmmakers to confirm that we can show their films online– since when they sent us their films the plan was to have an in-person festival.

Make sure you have “liked” us or are following us on Facebook in order to get notifications of our weekly postings.

Later in the year we’ll announce the winners in all of our film categories.

We really do hope that for the 15th Big Water Film Festival we will all be able to gather again with friends to watch films and meet the filmmakers who made them, but until then we hope you enjoy this year’s films.

 

Thank You to Our Sponsors:

Thank you to our Reception sponsors!  Ashland Baking Company, Benoit Cheese Haus, Chequamegon Food Coop, CoCo Artisan Breads and Good Eats, DaLou’s Bistro, Deep Water Grille , Hugo‘s Pizza, Maggie’s, North Coast Coffee, Pizza Pub, and The Snug.  

Thanks to our Festival sponsors for your support!