MISSION

The Big Muddy Film Festival (BMFF) strives to provide Southern Illinois with a rare opportunity to experience contemporary, innovative, and provocative works in film and video that have local and global relevance. The BMFF provides filmmakers a venue for screening, celebrating, and awarding their contributions to the art of cinema. The festival seeks to explore and push the boundaries of cinema, embracing genre- and form-bending practices, inter-media collaborations, underserved filmmakers, and cinema as a catalyst for community engagement. The festival is committed to bringing culturally-engaged art and artists from around the world to Southern Illinois. Through its close association with the Department of Cinema and Photography at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, the BMFF shares the department's mission of graduating critical, original, and socially responsible artists and scholars who, as global citizens, can imagine and produce alternatives in media theory and practice.

HISTORY

The Big Muddy Film Festival is one of the oldest film festivals in the U.S. affiliated with a university. The first meetings for the formation of festival were held in August, September, and October 1978 on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Initial meetings consistently attracted 40-50 community members and students.

The first Big Muddy Film Festival was held on March 30 - April 1 1979. The jurors were Lorraine Gray, Academy Award nominee for her documentary With Babes and Banners, Ron Epple, now deceased, who was president of Picture Start, and James Benning, an experimental-narrative filmmaker. Since then over eighty guest artists have juried the festival including Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Willmott, Tony Buba, Robert Frank, Julia Reichert, Christine Choy, Barbara Hammer, Trinh Min-Ha, Chel White, Santiago Alvarez, and Naomi Uman.

The festival has grown from approximately 35 entries in 1979 to 150-300 entries per year. These diverse films come from all 50 states, and from many countries all over the world including: India, Haiti, United Kingdom, Belgium, Iceland, Denmark, Taiwan and Singapore. The Big Muddy's reputation for programming excellence is recognized world wide by film and video professionals, as well as academics and faculty at distinguished institutions.

Today, we continue to celebrate the festival's grassroots origins and commitment to the local community, while expanding our definitions of cinema and local. We wholeheartedly believe that the Big Muddy Film Festival provides a vital link between education & practice, local & global, filmmaker & filmgoer, opportunity & accomplishment. What's next for the BMFF? That's up to all of us. The festival has only begun to reach its full potential.