The Big Water Film Festival takes place on the shores of Lake Superior, in Ashland, Wisconsin and surrounding communities. Our Festival headquarters is the Bay Theater on Main Street in Ashland, an Art Deco theater with a completely modernized main screen with stadium seating.
Regular attendees at our Festival know it for its friendliness and the ease with which audience members and filmmakers can mingle and chat.
Big Water's first twelve years were as a live Festival. Then, in 2020 COVID forced us to cancel what would have been the 13th BWFF. Our 14th and 15th Annual Festivals (we just decided to skip 13, like the 13th floor at a hotel) were all virtual. For our Festival in January, 2023, we returned to the theater, plus continued on with a virtual festival. You can see our festival website, including what films we presented most recently, here: https://17thbigwaterfilmfestival.eventive.org/welcome.
Our 18th Festival, to be held in January of 2026, will be a hybrid of live and online showings. We will have our live Festival on January 16-17, 2026. Filmmakers should plan to have accepted films shown online from January 18-February 1, 2026, through the Eventive platform, which provides full DRM anti-piracy protections.
We accept films of all genres and points of origin. Some of our favorite films have been made by local or Midwest filmmakers and some have come to us from all around the world, including Iran or France or Canada. Our website lists all of our previous award winners. https://16thbigwaterfilmfestival.eventive.org/awardwinners.
BWFF values your work and devotes a fair amount of its budget to awards. The Big Water Film Festival awards the following prizes: Best Feature, Best Short, Best Short-Short, Best Narrative Film, Best Documentary Film, Audience Favorite, and the Loren Savitsky Young Filmmaker Award. Each award comes with a certificate, a beautiful hand-made award bowl, and $150.
IF YOU WISH TO BE CONSIDERED FOR THE LOREN SAVITSKY YOUNG FILMMAKER AWARD, PLEASE INCLUDE A COVER LETTER WITH YOUR DATE OF BIRTH. A FILMMAKER MUST BE 25 YEARS OLD OR UNDER ON THE OPENING DATE OF THE LIVE FESTIVAL TO QUALIFY.