The Rossland Mountain Film Festival
Our festival was first conceived in 1999 as a way to showcase the film and photo works of local Kootenay film makers and photographers. The festival focuses mainly on films focusing on mountain culture and sports but are not limited to those genres either. Over the last 25 years our festival has grown from a single event to eight separate film screenings including a women's event, youth submission contest, main event featuring an out of town major music act and a speaker event featuring local and out of area speakers sharing their stories and experiences.
Our festival is entirely volunteer driven being organized by a dedicated board of directors that has changed over the years but normally ranges around 6-8 people. We also rely on volunteers to help run our events. We strive to keep our festival affordable by offering half our events free of charge and keeping our tickets priced affordably as well. We're a non-profit society largely funded by sponsorships and grants. We also purchase door prizes from local retailers and make donations after out festival in November to local charity groups including our local food band and museum society
We have music acts playing at three of our events and this year two are coming from out of the area, we also strive to bring in top quality music acts to compliment our collection of films. We take film submissions from filmmaker from across the globe but also purchase licenses to feature length ski and snowboard film each year as well. Our speaker series features local speakers sharing their experiences but we also try and bring in an our of area speaker to visit our small community as well.
We're in Rossland BC, a small ski town of 4000 people nestled in the mountains of Southern British Columbia. Our events are very well attended and have a consistent record of selling out for the ticketed events, but with small venues available in our town we can only sell so many tickets.
As we grow and expand our festival each year the costs grow as well. To cover our expenses and keep out ticket prices affordable we're hoping to crowd source additional funding to allow us to keep providing a high quality festival at an affordable price.
