Wild and Working Lands Film Festival

The fourth annual Wild and Working Lands Film Festival, hosted by the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Wyoming, will be held in Laramie, Wyoming and online in March 2025. The festival explores the intricate connections between humans and the landscapes where we dwell, work, and play.

We are especially interested in films that inspire audiences to better understand our current world and work toward a future where people and natural environments prosper together by:
- Communicating innovative research,
- Highlighting ground-breaking solutions,
- Arguing for paradigm shifts in our framing of environmental issues,
- Presenting portraits of people, places, and relationships between them,
- Raising awareness of emerging issues, or
- Sharing indigenous and local ways of knowing.

We value diversity, justice, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, sound information, and real-world solutions. From our home at the University of Wyoming, we embrace films set in our surrounding ecoregion—including wild, rural, and urban areas of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and high desert sagebrush steppe—as well as stories from afar that can inform our experience in the American West.

We invite submissions of short films (max 20 min) to show in our local theater during the festival and online in the weeks following the festival. All submissions will be considered for awards.

We also request that filmmakers allow us to show accepted films during limited community screenings of the festival across Wyoming. These are not-for-profit screenings that may include small ticket fees to cover the costs of the screening. The purpose is to fulfill our role as a land grant university by reaching constituents throughout Wyoming and to advance the festival mission of "inspiring audiences to better understand our current world and work toward a future where people and natural environments prosper together."