The El Dorado High School film festival is a private film festival for students at El Dorado High School in Placentia, CA.
There are awards given in each category. There are no cash prizes.
All current students at El Dorado High School are eligible to enter films. All films made in the last 12 months are eligible to be entered. Please understand that this is a high school film festival and all content should be appropriate for ALL AUDIENCES. Only G and PG films may be submitted. While we want to promote and encourage our students to be as creative as possible, we have rules in place against showing films that show or include guns, knives, actual or simulated drug use, sexual content, excessive violence and material that may be unreasonably insensitive to groups of people based on their race, ethnicity or sexuality. Some situations and behaviors may be implied, but not directly shown. Please contact the festival staff prior to submitting your work if you have any questions about content.
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April 2024
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The El Dorado Film Festival, or EDFF, in their 18th year of the event has been a very eye-opening experience for someone who has tried and failed to get into a film festival (or me). As my first year at a film festival of any kind, walking into the venue felt like walking up to a ceremony for receiving the medal of honor. The way the festival shows the participants on the silver screen pre-show coupled with ethereal/emotive music made me feel like an honored guest, and the amazing audio system itself made it a show of its own. When the screen officially begun, the screen of each nominated submission from each category is professionally executed. In between each category was Hailey being comedic in her presentation of each respective category, like the clip for the music video category. I can't say this enough, but the audio system of the festival venue is just amazing, its loud and bassy, just like a movie cinema, and is just straight up immersive. At the end of each category, when the honorable mentions and winners are announced, the atmosphere is suspenseful, but still ethereal and invokes a sense of ceremonial honor, the most ecstatic I've been so far. There is only a minor issue I have with the screening though, which I think may be partly my fault of submitting my film, Men of God, in an unconventional aspect ratio of 2.39:1, and as a result, our film was projected in a very cropped version of what's meant to be a DCI Scope experience; I felt that the audience may not be experiencing the full film with a majority of it being out of frame. This is only a minor issue, I believe, as the audience most likely already know what the film was supposed to be like, given my style of working with ultra wide footage. Overall, this is an amazing festival, and invokes a sense of importance and honor in everyone who were nominated. I can't imagine what the freshmen were thinking, being selected for a festival alongside their older peers, and getting honored for it. This is an event I will never forget, to me this is like reaching a milestone of my life after the numerous rejections I've had in the past. From this festival, I've learned of numerous talented artists in our school, and I'm looking forward to working with them in the future. Thank you, Mr. Switzer and Hailey for your hard work, this festival is very well organized.
May 2021 -
Adam Gorny
May 2017
