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.

2021 On-line Festival.

COVID has forced us to change our plans again. Last year we cancelled the Festival altogether; this year we are not letting that happen, but we will be doing things differently.

The Big Water Committee is reviewing all of the films submitted for both the 2020 and 2021 Festivals (that’s a lot of films), and will be making Festival selections, just like always. Starting in late Fall and going through mid-Winter, we will then post links on Facebook to 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.

We promise: we’ll have the same great selection of films as we’ve always had. And keep in mind that filmmakers have had the same year and a half of isolation that the rest of us have had and would love to have people see the work that they spent so much time and money and heart on.

All you need to do to watch the films is click on the link. The Festival will be totally free this year, and you can even attend in your pajamas.

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, except for Audience Favorite. With this year’s format, we can’t easily implement a fair way to count your votes.

We really do hope that in 2022 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.

2019 Awards: The 12th Big Water Film Festival is in the books! Thanks to everyone (filmmakers, volunteers, sponsors, and audience members) who made it happen. Here are this year’s award winners:

Best Feature and Audience Favorite: Love Them First, Lindsey Seavert and Ben Garvin
Best Documentary: From Seed to Seed, Katharina Steiffenhofer
Best Short: Wanted:Strong Woman, Marilyn Cooke
Best Short-Short: Fairy Tail, Justin and Kristin Schaack
Loren Savitsky Young Filmmaker Award: , Ouroboros, Emma Keehan

Honorable Mention: Fraser Syndrome and Me, Kyle Anne Grendys
Congratulations!

Check out our new ticket sales page. We’ve made purchasing tickets online very easy, and you can now purchase tickets online for all sites.

Special thanks to the Ashland Foundation for funding the purchase of a spotlight for our use at the Bay Theater. Filmmakers will no longer have to answer questions in the dark!

The schedule is up!

Our 2019 Schedule is posted! Our film descriptions are also posted.

New venues!

Our Bayfield showings are moving from the Bayfield Carnegie Library to the more spacious environs of the Bayfield High School Library. We hope this will give our audience more room to enjoy the films. Thanks to Blair and the City Library for their support these past years, and thanks to the Bayfield School District for welcoming us to their campus.

And remember that as of last year we are having screenings again in Washburn, at the Harbor View Event Center. Special thanks to our Washburn sponsors who are helping to make this happen: Ron’s Repair and Towing, Washburn Family Dentistry, and Olson Building Supplies.

Film Entries

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Thank You to Our Sponsors:

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