Welcome to the
Seattle Film Festival
A note from our Directors
Our festival continues to take
pride in supporting and
launching Seattle area, national
and international filmmakers,
actors, writers and producers.
Our 2022 festival kicked off with
a meet & greet boat cruise across
Lake Union.
After a weekend of successful
theater screenings at the Grand Illusion Cinema, the festival continued with an awards show gala at the Bellevue Seattle Courtyard Marriott.
A two-week online festival featuring over 150 national and international films concluded this year's festival.
Outgoing Festival Director David Harrington is excited for the festival's future:
“The new festival directors William Wayne and Michael Rey have injected fresh life into the festival. William’s passion and experience as an award-winning indie filmmaker (Lost Angelas) and experience working at film companies such as Lionsgate, make him an ideal candidate to champion festival films and along with the producing skills of Michael Rey, they make a powerful team”
The Seattle Film Festival was created for independent filmmakers as a place to flourish and showcase original works.
Therefore, we welcome filmmakers of all ages around the world, with any budget, to submit their film to our festival.
We look forward to your submissions and what's going to be a spectacular 2023 for the Seattle Film Festival and all our participating filmmakers!
William Wayne
Michael Rey
Directors
The Seattle Film Festival, Seattle, WA
Festival Directors William Wayne and Michael Rey
About
The Seattle Film Festival
The Seattle Film Festival, an IMDb.com qualifying awards event and one of the Top 100 Best Reviewed film festivals out of over 10,000 festivals on FilmFreeway, is about the independent filmmaker. We are small enough so that your film does not get lost in our submissions or schedule. But we are large enough to offer a beautiful screening venue to display and showcase your films and get media coverage.
The festival was founded in 2013 with a focus on short films and documentary shorts. We grew over the next few years by word of mouth running annually through 2016.
It was to our surprise in 2019, when a collective of local filmmakers who had been involved in our festival in previous years inspired us to relaunch the festival and this time with the addition of narrative feature films, documentary features, web series, music videos and various other categories.
While working with local filmmakers, we found they preferred a larger choice of categories to submit to at the Seattle Film Festival to fit the growing number of submissions and a better chance to receive a meaningful award.
We have expanded the Seattle Film Festival to not only present your films in a historic Seattle movie theater in front of a live audience and jury but also, with the new addition of a concurrently running online festival, are able to give a large number of films International exposure.
We had 12 jurors which consists of veteran filmmakers, screenwriters, producers and actors.
The Seattle Film Festival also offers Q & A sessions and film industry networking opportunities.
We are part of a solid network of other film festivals, so submitting your movies to us may open up many more opportunities for you.
In addition, numerous indie film critics, reviewers and industry insiders have attended our festival.