Hosted by the College Of Lake County, the Lake County Film Festival screens to an audience of more than 700,000 county residents in a community underserved in the area of independent cinema. Patrons of the film festival are engaged, eager, and excited to watch films from independent filmmakers across all different genres and walks of life.
The festival prides itself on providing a platform for a diverse group of filmmakers. From sex to race to genre: the Lake County Film Festival has stories for everybody. We strive for gender parity in our slate, and we crave more work from diverse voices.
We are proud of our history showing the early work of filmmakers like Mike Flannagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep), Chad Hartigan (Morris From America, This Is Martin Bonner), Alex Karpovsky (Girls), and Leah Meyerhoff (I Believe In Unicorns, Film Fatales), but we're also incredibly proud of all the great films we've shown by people that haven't achieved the same level of recognition. It is one of our great pleasures to present films that recently screened at some of the countries' largest film festivals side by side with films that were made by people with their daughters over the weekend.
If nothing else, the Lake County Film Festival is a filmmakers’ film festival. From the number of filmmakers who have attended in years past, the consensus is those who attend the screenings are passionate movie lovers, creating opportunities for filmmakers and audiences to engage with one another on their shared passion.
We love independent movies, and we want to see your film, so submit to us!
We usually give our jurors a lot of leeway with awards, but we will definitely be giving out awards for the following:
Audience Awards:
Best Narrative Feature
Best Documentary Feature
Best Narrative Short Film
Best Documentary Short FIlm
Jury Awards:
Best Narrative Feature
Best Documentary Feature
Best Narrative Short
Best Documentary Short
This year our hosting sponsor, The College Of Lake County, will be offering two prizes of $250 each to the two winners of the student short film competition. One for best documentary film, and one for best narrative film.