FLM FWD festival Barrington RI, is a Small Town Film Festival in a context conceived to encourage community building, showcasing family-appropriate content to promote equity. Our goal is to provide a template for other similar communities who have the ability to further the directors messages through local interactions. We have already been invited to collaborate on this basis in two adjacent communities.

In 2022 we will add our first annual Environment festival July 22-23. We titled our festival: Agency & Urgency. This three-day festival calls for submissions of shorts and feature films that that will both educate viewers about the climate crisis but also motivate them to participate in and find solutions of all levels of impact. 

Each of our subjects is presented to the community as films that are submitted to a competition and chosen by a jury. In this way we provide educational content in a cultural, artistic and entertaining experience.

We have already had a great festival on Empathy (August 2021) that we will repeat in august 2022. By 2023 we will run three individual annual festivals on different topics (Environment, Youth and Empathy).

We have chosen our film festival subject matter to attract many different residents. Our events are free. They contextualize the films themselves in an arts-centric outdoor festival and there are no barriers to entry of any kind and something for all ages. We spread them out over several days each time (Friday through Sunday) with different events on different days to give families a reason to stay in town to attend.

Awards & Prizes

This unique film festival seeks not only to award jury prizes but ultimately will create a funding entity to support filmmakers and their projects. Although specific awards (and award amounts) are not yet determined, filmmakers selected for the inaugural festival will be recognized on our social media and other channels of communication and supported for their participation.

Our first festival resulted in:
- invitations to a winning directors to speak in our community for an honorarium and have their films screened multiple times.
-our marketing support of a filmmaker's fundraising initiatives for a feature length film

Rules & Terms

FLM FWD Environmental festival film submissions should address/express issues about climate & nature biodiversity. Our specific focus is all youth engagement, especially high-school aged. Climate education and awareness are of interest. The audience should leave with an increased awareness of climate change and its root causes. We are looking for films that touch on these subjects and help to better understand: the urgency and severity of the climate crisis, that aspects of the climate impact are avoidable by implementing already existing solutions, what are the main obstacles for implementing these solutions. Help people to realize that the climate crisis will not go away unless solved. And that nobody can evade the worst outcomes. Help to understand Nature is NOT our enemy, but sustains us. Teach about Extraction vs. regeneration

The FLM FWD Festival seeks to include short films of all genres, narrative, documentary, animation or other.