The Northampton Film Festival is organized by a team of Pioneer Valley-based filmmakers, curators, and organizers who are passionate about building community through film. Originally a corporately-run festival, NFF was taken over in 2015 by members of Northampton Community Television, a community media arts organization, who had their own ideas for its future relevance.
Described by Boston-based news outlet MassLive as “returning with a full quiver of artistic arrows,” last years festival "offered up a broad palette of moving image offerings, from the local to the international, and guided attendees to experiences in art and technology largely unavailable elsewhere in the Valley.”
Although we are a small festival, the unique interests of each of our team members allow us to offer a wide variety of thoughtful programming, including over 48 films across 9 venues in downtown Northampton.
“This unique festival crosses lines of genre, geography, and medium. It involves the collaboration of a number of community partners like the City of Northampton, the Arts Council, Good Nights Sleep (an experimental film collective), Forbes Library, Historic Northampton, and many other partners.” - Festival Director Al Williams.
Last year’s tracks included feature-length narrative and documentary works, animation, films by local artists, children’s programming, virtual reality and augmented reality experiences, cult classic events, and filmmaking workshops. Some examples of our unique programming have included a screening curated by local filmmaker Sarah Bliss entitled Stretching the Frame: Death, Dying, and the Material Body, which showcased work by members of the Waltham-based analog film collective AgX; an installation of films from Iran which were each under 60 seconds; and a midnight showing of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult classic House.
The Northampton Film Festival has recently hosted the premier of “Crowd Sourced Cinema,” a public art project in which the scenes and soundtrack of a classic film such as The Princess Bride or Back to the Future are re-created by teams of community members and edited together by NCTV Media Wizard Jenn Ramsay. The Crowdsourced Cinema screening has traditionally closed the festival with an overflowing audience packed with people who created scenes, roaring with laughter.
Throughout this varied programming, our overall mission is to connect the Pioneer Valley to conversations happening around the world through visual media, and offer inroads to participation. This year we are thrilled to be adding a competitive program of non-fiction shorts. We are seeking films that provoke dialogue about such issues as the ethics of ethnographic practice, intersections between fiction and realism, and formal experimentation, on equal measure to their subject matter. We seek to bring the most thoughtful, stirring, and revealing films the world has to offer to our community in order to produce new ways of thinking and inform our own work in the world. Thank you for your interest in being part of our festival, and good luck!
Best Non-Fiction Short: $200
Best Non-Fiction Short - Runner Up: $100