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 next Big Water Film Festival will be virtual once again.

After much consideration, the Big Water Film Festival Committee has decided that once again our Festival will be virtual only. The COVID pandemic keeps throwing all of us curveballs. We have no way of knowing how dangerous congregating in a movie theater will be this Fall, and yet the pretty long lead time we need to put on the Festival required us to decide this summer whether we feel comfortable inviting our audience to gather in person. The decision was made easier by the great reception given to our virtual 14th Annual Festival. Many more people– from all around the world– saw our films virtually than usually see them in person, and a lot of people told us they appreciated the safety and convenience of viewing the films online.

Still, we miss getting together in person with our audience and filmmakers, and hope this year to re-introduce our popular Cinema and Cinnamon Rolls discussions with filmmakers in a live virtual programming format.

As with last year, tickets for the Festival will be absolutely free. We had such great support last year through voluntary donations that we were able to pay all our expenses even though we sold no tickets. Please keep supporting us this year, so that we can keep making the Festival free and open to anyone who wants to watch.

Just as a reminder of some of the great films we screened last year, here are the winners of the 14th 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)

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