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.

The 14th Annual Big Water Film Festival was a big success!

The 14th Annual Big Water Film Festival has now finished up. Our first venture into the land of virtual film festivals came off better than we ever dreamed! First off, we had spectacular films. We thank every filmmaker who entrusted us with their film to show to our audience. Next, we had great audiences. If each week of our films had been a block of films showing at the Bay Theater in Ashland, we would have more than sold out the theater, more than once. Finally, due to the donations that many of you made to the Film Festival and due to the Chequamegon Food Co-op’s including us in their “chip-up” program, we broke even, even though we sought no sponsors and charged no admission fees. Thank you!

Here are the winners of this year’s Big Water Film Festival Awards:

Audience Favorite: Better Than Neil Armstrong – Alireza Ghasemi – Iran. (Week 1)

Best Short: Cold Storage – Thomas Freundlich- Finland. (Week 7)

Best Short-Short: Amanzi Olwandle – Timothy Hay – South Africa. (Week 7)

Best Feature: Skate or Die – Ryan Ferguson – United States. (Week 2)

Best Documentary: Say His Name – Five Days for George Floyd – Cy Dodson – United States. (Week 2)

We are already receiving films for our consideration for the 15th Big Water Film Festival. We’ll be posting more about that in the months to come.

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