CLOSED UNTIL A VENUE IS SECURED FOR SCREENING 2019 FILMS
The Watchdog Film Festival is all about celebrating quality film-making on topics of social and societal importance.
This festival accepts submissions from all over the world with a particular focus on films that make the viewer question the traditions, practices, systems, and hierarchies within the contemporary world. These can be fiction films, fact-based-fiction, investigative documentaries, exposés, and journalism-related films.
The festival event will be held in Brisbane, Australia and will screen the best entries including smartphone films, documentaries, fiction films, student films, charity (not-for-profit company) made films, and corporation made films. The 2019 event will take place later this year (probably late August or early September) depending upon the new venue.
FILMMAKERS:
We are the first and only film festival that will screen investigative films that dive into worlds otherwise unknown. We will shortlist films that cover matters of social importance and public significance and that ask us to question our own individual world or our systems within society. These can be documentaries, fictional films, narratives, journalism-style segments, and so on, as long as the film has an important message for society, be well researched, and based on fact. For example, the movie Okja explains the complexity of the meat industry to viewers in a very skilled, entertaining and tactful way drawing parallels to all of the meat industry including the dog meat trade. Okja is explaining our corporate meat culture back to itself and thus is a "watchdog" style fiction film. Another great example is Blood Diamond (film) and Blood Diamonds (documentary) which both explain the consequences of the real diamond trade in parts of Africa. These movies expose socio-political and economic systems so viewers can question the diamond industry and whether they want to support it.
Other examples of films with a watchdog message using a watchdog style are.....
Fiction:
Crash
V for Vendetta
Nightcrawler
Click
Pay It Forward
Happy Feet
The Big Short
Dear White People
Shattered Glass
War Dogs
Documentaries:
Food, Inc.
Bowling for Columbine
Super Size Me
Who Killed the Electric Car?
Inside Job
Citizenfour
The Story of Aaron Swartz, The Man Who Could Change the World
Even though the above films have a high budget, we are happy to accept no or low budget films especially those financed via crowdfunding.
The program for this festival will be announced early 2018 and we seek to screen several investigative exposés, several smartphone made films, a few feature length films, and several short films.
Attendance at the event will be free for cast and crew of submitted films and winners will be featured on our Facebook page, on our website, and on twitter.
Anyone attending this film festival will learn a lot from the content of the screened films as well as network with other filmmakers and industry professionals.
This will be a great event!
Only the best films will recieve awards. Films will be shortlisted as "Finalists," which means you are nominated for an award. All nominated films will have a very short teaser screened along with the title and award nomination (category). The winning film will be screened in full.