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The town will host its first-ever film festival in May in several locations around downtown.
Ridgefield Independent Film Festival Director Joanne Hudson said the festival started as an idea in the arts council and “caught fire over the summer” when the festival started accepting submissions on an online platform called FilmFreeway.
Hudson said she has seen other small towns such Williamstown, Mass., hold arts festivals. So she thought, why not Ridgefield?
“It's a very collaborative, very arts-oriented community, especially for a community of this size," Hudson told the Daily Voice. "It just made sense to have something of that nature here.”
The festival will run the gamut from shorts to features. Filmmakers range from students to experienced professionals.
Each film will be placed into a block, which could be a combination of features and shorts. “You might see a feature with a short in front of it, or you might see a block of shorts,” Hudson said.
The festival will also feature master classes, which will be available to those with an all-festival or all-access pass.
Hudson and her team are currently gearing up for the festival, pairing films with the appropriate venues and collecting the films from the filmmakers for the screenings.
Technology aside, Hudson said the festival’s mission is to make the world a more compassionate place through the showing of films.
“These films are like a kind of a language that we all know even if we live thousands of miles away in a place where we don’t understand each other,” Hudson said. “We are all the same in so many ways, and we speak with this visual language we can share.”
For more information on the festival or to purchase tickets, visit the festival’s website here.
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