Festival Dates: April 10 - 12, 2025

To Submit:

• Submission Deadline: March 1, 2025.

• Entries may be submitted through our Film Freeway page or by filling out the Online Entry Form.

• Submitted works must have been completed after the 1st of January, 2023.

• Entry Fee:
  

  • Regular Entry: $12
    

  • College Student: $5
    Students should be currently enrolled at a university or college and must send a current student ID (photocopy is fine) to: wvmsff@gmail.com.
    

  • West Virginia students Only: FREE
    Students currently enrolled in a WV college or university may use waiver code: wvstudent25 on Filmfreeway. Must also send a current WV student ID (photo copy is fine) to: wvmsff@gmail.com.
    

• Entry fee payment can be made through Film Freeway or through the Payment link at the end of the bottom of the Submissions page.

• Students must be currently enrolled at a university or college and must send a current student ID (photo copy is fine) to: wvmsff@gmail.com.

• Artists agree to allow festival organizers to use selected works for promotional materials and events.

Submission Categories:

We welcome works in a broad range of styles and categories as outlined below. These include standard forms (narrative, documentary, animation etc.) a thematic category “Space”, and several options for VR and video installation work at this year's event. If you're not sure where your work fits in, just submit and choose the category that most closely matches your work. We value quality and creativity over dogmatism of form. If your work is selected, we may change its categorization for purely programming purposes.

• Experimental

• Short Narrative

• Documentary

• Animation

• Student Work

• Theme: Space

• Two-Channel Video Installation

• VR

• 360-Degree Dome Projection (Planetarium)
  

Space Theme:

For this year’s themed category, we’re thinking about “space” - in all dimensions - - physical, social, psychological, conceptual, philosophical, cosmological and local. During the pandemic, our sense of space became severely contracted. We were locked in the physically small confines of our homes. We were left dwelling in our own mental spaces. At the same time, our lives moved more fully into the vastness of online space. Now, roughly 3 years out from that time of isolation, our various senses of space continue to evolve, both locally and globally. At the level of the individual, many people struggle to reintegrate themselves into a more expansive sense of social space while the political space seems more hostile and isolating than ever. Zooming out, the continuous march of global climate change and its concomitant social and political upheavals reshape environments and populations. All the while, advances in technologies continue to alter how we manage, navigate, and perceive space in myriad ways both subtle and profound.

The festival seeks submissions that ruminate on the many social, psychological, philosophical, and material meanings of space. How do we experience space, both architectural and natural, in a bodily way? How do we make space for meaningful dialogue that bridges ideological gaps? How does the fantasy of outer space offer the promise of new possible futures? How do digital spaces permeate our material lives? Are we “in space” or do we make it? How do war and peace shape it? What philosophical, psychological, spiritual or political resonances cause these layers of space to intersect and fold in on themselves? Indeed, how might our understanding of the very nature of space itself be shifting at this notably tenuous moment in human history?