COVID Update: Festival postponed till 2023.

The Irish Adventure Film Festival (formally the Why Not? Adventure Film Festival) is an annual adventure sports documentary film festival. It takes place in stunning Westport, on the west coast of Ireland. Situated along the Wild Atlantic Way.

The festival has two guiding principles - to inspire people to undertake their own adventures. No matter how small. And to honour those filmmakers and athletes who share their vision of the outdoors with us.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The festival is going into its 7th year. We're small, compared with the BANFF's of the world. With no plans to expand.

Only 13-15% of film submitted get screened. Ranging from Oscar nominated directors, Emmy award winning producers and talented amateurs.

We have a ‘shared’ festival experience - which means we only have one film programme. Everyone experiences the same films. And speakers.

HOWEVER...we also run a monthly Adventure Film Club, where we screen (with permission :) many of the films that we couldn’t at the festival.

There is a submission fee. $10 for short films. $15 for feature length. Which you don’t have to pay if you don’t want to. We’ll waiver it if you ask. We completely understand that many projects are labours of love and having to pay festival entry fee’s is not much fun.

Most of your submission fee goes into the prize pot. Which is why the prize fund fluctuates a little year to year.

Last year we awarded $1000 in cash prizes to filmmakers.

We have links with film distributors in Ireland - which may be of value to you.

Whether or not you decide to submit to the festival, best of luck with your current and future projects.

Hope you get chatting to you soon. Let me know if you have any questions,
Graham


> Grand Jury Prize.
> Best Short Film (Adventure & Environmental)
> Best Feature Film
> Best Film Soundtrack (Adventure & Environmental)
> People’s Choice Award
> The Mc Conkey Award - Most inspiring adventure film as decided by the audience.

---Prize Money---
> Prize money is re-distributed directly from entry fee's. We take a small percentage of each submission fee and put the majority of it towards our filmmaker prize fund. Therefore the total prize fund fluctuates depending on that total number of paid film submissions.

> There are two prize funds:
Grand Jury Winner & People's Choice Award

> If you can't afford the submission fee or don't wish to pay it you can ask for an exemption (ie - not pay the fee). However - if you don't pay a submission fee and your film win's a category you're ineligible to your share of the prize fund. It would be unfair on those that have paid the submission fee.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES.

0. If you are an amateur film maker you can select the students fee for your submission.
We define an amateur filmmaker as someone who hasn't made money through film making (ie - haven't sold films online or offline, haven't gotten paid for making a film).

1. We only accept film submissions via FilmFreeway.

2. If your film is selected as part of the 2019 Festival we’ll ask for a digital copy that we can download in the following format:

Films should be encoded as a .mp4 file using the H.264 format, with a bitrate of up to 30Mbps maximum.

Please use the AAC Audio Codec with a sample rate of 48,000Hz and a bitrate of 320kbps.

Please export your film at the same frame rate, aspect ratio and resolution (up to 1080p) that it was shot and edited in.

3. Please enable the 'REQUEST DOWNLOAD' function when you submit your film so that we can download it if needed.

4. Include promotional assets with your submission (photos, film posters, etc).

5. This is an ADVENTURE SPORT DOCUMENTARY film festival. There is also an ENVIRONMENTAL aspect to the film festival and we welcome environmental documentary film submissions. We ONLY accept documentary films in those two genres

(...if you submit a film that doesn't fit either of those two criteria it'll likely mean that you didn't read our very simple guidelines and just pressed 'submit'. In which case we will likely take your submission fee, head to our favourite pub, ask Mike our favourite barman for a pint of Guinness and toast to your film before hitting the 'not accepted' button :).

To find out more about the festival visit www.irishadventurefilmfestival.com

Overall Rating
Quality
Value
Communication
Hospitality
Networking
  • antonin michaud-soret

    Great event, great programmation ! Perfect place to screen ou rmovie. Thanks,

    April 2019
  • Adam Rabinowitz

    We were very fortunate to be accepted to the Irish Adventure Film Festival, we were even more fortunate that we had the chance to go to the Festival.
    The communication from the get go was great and we could straight away tell that Graham (The Organizer) cares dearly about the festival, the films and the filmmakers.
    We met very inspiring people during the festival and saw every film screened at the two day festival and they were all extraordinary, but most importantly Graham was the best host one could ask for.
    If you have the option to go to the festival either as a viewer or as a filmmaker, go, go go.

    April 2019