Founded in 1977 and continuing its journey for 38 years now, Canada’s oldest international film festival is the only truly competitive film festival in the continent of North America. Being culturally diverse, containing a wide array of programs and offering an array of great and honorable awards, the Montreal World Film Festival is a huge annual public event that earned itself great renown and respect through its wide scale success.
A Diverse Event
The Montreal World Film Festival, as the name suggests, is held in the wonderful city of Montreal in Quebec, a province of Canada, and spans for exactly 10 days after its opening ceremony held in late August. While obviously promoting good films and good filmmakers, the main goal of the festival is to create an environment full of people from different countries, ethnicities and backgrounds, and have them all respect and understand one another through one common interest; quality cinema. Other than that, the festival offers a number of different programs and categories such as:
- World Competition
- Feature Films
- Fiction
- Documentaries
- Short Films
- Tributes
- Student Film Festival
- Cinema Under The Stars
The Judge, The Jury & The General Public
Before the competitions, judges are picked out carefully from a wide selection of respectable and talented international artists to hold the duty of presenting the awards based on various categories and merits. But these guys aren’t the only ones to judge the films; the public attending the festival has the ability to vote for their favorite films, with the addition of voting for the films they believed to be the best within their respective categories. The films with the most votes in a certain category win their respective awards.
As deemed by the International Federation of Film Producers Association, the Montreal World Film Festival is the only official competitive film festival in the entire continent of North America. With over 400 films from 80 different countries and an attendance of 350,000+ people, the Montreal World Film Festival is indeed a huge event every filmmaker should strive to attend.