ByDesign Festival is a cross-cultural exploration of people, structures, and ideas at the intersection of design and the moving image.

Featuring a broad, inclusive selection of films, performances, and interactive activities, ByDesign invites festivalgoers to interrogate their own relationships to personal and collective identity and to examine how humanity’s understanding of itself is central to the ways in which it creates the physical world.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum, programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, and juried awards, the festival fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.

Since 2005, Children’s Film Festival Seattle has grown to become the largest film festival on the West Coast dedicated to children and their families. Each year, Northwest Film Forum has selected international children’s films from dozens of countries, reaching more than 10,000 people during festival screenings in Seattle and a subsequent festival tour of 20-25 U.S. cities.

Children’s Film Festival Seattle celebrates the best and brightest in international film programs for children, including animation, feature-length films, short films and hands-on workshops. CFFS provides a joyous and dynamic setting that aims to inspire younger generations to participate as agents of change in their local and global communities.

CFFS emphasizes visual storytelling that is centered on the experience of childhood. We prioritize stories that have been underrepresented in the mainstream media and inspire empathy, understanding, and a nuanced view of the world. Our commitment to racial and gender equity, inclusivity, social justice and global awareness supports our aim to create the best in age-appropriate, visual storytelling for young people.

Northwest Film Forum’s annual Local Sightings Film Festival showcases the growing complexity of creative communities in the Pacific Northwest. Featuring a competitive selection of curated shorts and feature film programs, Local Sightings 2022 invites regional artists to experiment, break, and remake popular conceptions around filmmaking and film exhibition.

Working in conjunction with Pacific Northwest film centers and community partners, Local Sightings will use screenings, panels, workshops, performances and more to encourage critical discourse around the medium, with an eye towards a regional elevation of the industry.

Engauge is an experimental film festival based in Seattle, WA sponsored by INTERBAY CINEMA SOCIETY, a film arts organization dedicated to promoting works that originate on analog film.

Engauge considers films that began on celluloid, e.g. 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, 70mm film.

That means that somewhere in your own film-making process, you the filmmaker actually worked directly with celluloid, by loading film into a camera and shooting it, or looking through and selecting found footage, or directly scratching, painting, or drawing on, collaging or photogramming objects onto film.

An annual showcase of cutting-edge, experimental, found-media film and video!

Founded in 2009, the Festival of (In)appropriation is a preeminent international showcase for experimental, found-media film and video. Every year, the Festival attracts artists working across an astonishing array of moving-image formats while probing the limits of collage, machinima, re-mix, détournement, mash-up, and more. The raw material for their work derives from the abundant new sources of audiovisual media to have surfaced in recent decades, from official state and commercial archives to vernacular collections, home movie repositories, and digital databases of every stripe.

By exploiting and refashioning these pre-existing materials, such creations generate novel juxtapositions and recombinations, often producing ideas and meanings that were unintended or unimagined by the original makers. These remarkable works, in other words, are “inappropriate” in the profoundest sense of the term.

Sponsored by Los Angeles Filmforum, the Festival of (In)appropriation strives to evince the remarkable range, sophistication, and critical impact of this vital aesthetic practice.

Lights Dance Festival began with its inaugural event held at the Drake Hotel in Toronto on June 18th, 2017. A collaboration with Momentum Dance Toronto, we opened to a full house and offered a hybrid program that interweaved cinematic and live-dance components.

​Lights Dance wants to make dance more accessible to all. Our vision is to create a safe space for those who want to learn and encounter dance in a fresh way whilst providing a platform on which underrepresented artists can collaborate and showcase their work. With the belief that dance is a connecting force, capable of forging new relationships and hope, we strive for ways to evolve and increase our community engagement.

​Lights Dance is a not-for-profit community initiative looking to build connections and make space for vibrant dance cultures.

Make Believe is a film festival located in the Columbia City section of Seattle, dedicated to shining a light on the best in horror, science fiction, fantasy, animation, and everything else we can couch under that blanket ‘genre’. There are few areas of the country more steeped in the fantastical than Seattle, and with MBSFF we hope to shine a dark light on that energy that courses through the PNW’s veins.

The Seattle Erotic Art Festival, along with its parent organization the Pan Eros Foundation, is excited to present the second annual Pan Eros Film Festival at the SIFF Film Center in the Seattle Center. We welcome erotic art films that will engage you, titillate you, and make you think.

Science Fiction + Fantasy Short Film Festival (SFFSFF) is an annual film festival hosted by MoPOP and SIFF to celebrate new and innovative additions to the science fiction and fantasy cinematic arts.

SAFF strives to present a variety of excellent contemporary films that provide insight into the art, complexity and diversity of SWANA and the Arab world. We seek to cultivate an ecosystem that amplifies Arab film and media projects while empowering Arab talent and highlighting emerging voices. We invite filmmakers from around the world to submit their films. Our judges appreciate auteur cinema-films informed by a unique artistic vision.

Seattle Asian American Film Festival (SAAFF) is the only film festival in Seattle to provide a space for Asian American voices, perspectives, and histories by screening independent films that reflect the diversity and richness of the city’s Asian American communities.

SAAFF features works by or about North Americans of Asian descent, with an emphasis on filmmakers from the Pacific Northwest.

The annual Seattle Black Film Festival (formerly the Langston Hughes African American Film Festival – LHAAFF) is a major season program of LANGSTON, showing provocative films and works about the Black experience from independent filmmakers.

The festival brings stories and experiences by and about Black people to the big screen in the heart of Seattle’s historically Black neighborhood. Housed at the historic Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute, the festival features film screenings, hands-on workshops, panel discussions, and in-depth chats with filmmakers, industry professionals and local community leaders.

Deaf Spotlight inspires and showcases Deaf Culture and Sign Languages through the arts.

Deaf Spotlight believes in cultivating a vibrant community of emerging and experienced Deaf filmmakers, actors, writers, and producers; and welcome any film makers from the Deaf community to participate. Deaf Spotlight hopes to see more BIPOC filmmakers/actors of all experience levels to submit their film(s) for SDFF.

Seattle Queer Film Festival has been an important part of the Seattle queer film community since 1996, and has remained the largest of its kind in the PNW. Since then the festival has expanded to intentionally showcase stories reflecting the vast spectrums and intersections of our queer communities. SQFF has evolved to be a hybrid festival, including in person screenings, dazzling parties, engaging community meetups, virtual and IRL conversations, panels with filmmakers, and inspiring educational workshops.

Produced by Three Dollar Bill Cinema

The Social Justice Film Festival returns in 2022, celebrating a decade of justice through cinema and conversation in partnership with a host of community partners to explore all aspects of social justice through the art of filmmaking.

Based in Seattle, Washington, a city known for progressive politics, technology innovation and stunning natural surroundings, the festival brings together filmmakers from around the world to encourage interaction and engagement through film and events.

The festival will include programming and speakers that bring attention to social justice concerns in the world, and celebrate the stories of groups and people who are working for a better future. We will exhibit shorts and feature-length documentaries and narrative films from the U.S. and around the world.

The South Sound Experimental Film Fest is a curation of experimental short films from local artists in the Pacific Northwest. We began in the South Sound region of Washington state. Our aim is to provide a community for the consistent exploration and development of the creative potentialities of the growing medium. Our attempt is to platform film-makers who may otherwise get pushed to the fringe due to identity, insufficient resources, or “quality” of technique.

Our first film festival launched on November 12th, 2021 in collaboration with the Northwest Film Forum. As a partner, SSEFF was able to contribute to a vast international network of ambiguity, experimentation, new filmic vocabulary and contemporary hybridity within the usage, development, and screening of film.

It is our intention to present northwest cinephiles with a wider lens to look through in hopes of finding a multiplicity of voices from our region.

Translations: Seattle Trans Film Festival showcases films by, for and about trans, non-binary, and gender non-confirming people. Launched in 2006, Translations is one of only nine trans-focused film festivals in the world, providing an innovative space for creation and connection for under-represented and marginalized identities. A vital community space, this hybrid festival unites audiences and filmmakers from around the globe. Through virtual and in-person screenings, parties, panels, workshops, and community meet-ups, Translations invests in relationships that build bridges and advocate for a more equitable future.

Translations is produced by Three Dollar Bill Cinema, an organization that strengthens, connects, and reflects diverse communities through queer film and media. We recognize that the term transgender is an umbrella term that fits many different types of people, as well as not fitting some people at all. We strive to provide a place for the exploration of transgender identities and issues through cinema, as the community continues to evolve with time.