You are cordially invited to be part of the upcoming 54th Annual WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival! The oldest Indie Film Festival in the whole wide world! WorldFest gave first awards to giants of the film industry, including Spielberg, Lucas, Ang Lee, the Coen Brothers, Ridley Scott, John Lee Hancock, Brian de Palma, Randal Kleiser, Oliver Stone, David Lynch and literally hundreds more! We are happy to accept Online FilmFreeway Screeners! We have Big LG 110" Digital Screens for our juries! Not Interns seeing/judging your entry on little laptops. Since we show our Remi Winners on big Cinemark Theater screens, it seems right that we look at your production on a big flat screen! We do also accept DVD, BLURAY or USB FLASH/PEN/JUMP DRIVE for judging and for Theater Screening. Region Zero, please! (If you win a Remi, you may be screened on big screens to real theater audience!! So we require: a BluRay, Jump Drive or DCP for the DCP screening! Large juries view your entry on a big digital screen, not a little laptop! {Screenplay entries must be bound}! We will personally confirm your entry's arrival. We will personally let you know the jury results, and if you win a Remi Award, we will invite you to attend the 54th WorldFest, and you will receive a $1,000 VIP Platinum Pass with our compliments and special deep discounts on Platinum Passes for your associates!
We do prefer Premieres, as we do not want to be Number 11 on your festival list of screenings! We discovered Spielberg, Lucas, Ang Lee, The Coen Brothers, Randal Kleiser, Coppola and David Lynch, with their Premieres - those many new festivals did not! Therefore WorldFest requires a Premiere of some level, World, USA, South West! If your entry has been all over, we reserve those screening slots for true Premieres, but you could still win a Remi Award.
Script Winners receive an InkTip Script Listing: A listing of your script on InkTip so that producers and reps can find you.
InkTip helps writers sell their scripts and get representation. Producers have made more than 200 films from scripts and writers they found through InkTip.
WorldFest was founded over 53 years ago as Cinema Arts, an International Film Society in August, 1961. WorldFest became the third competitive international film festival in North America, following San Francisco and New York. WorldFest is the oldest Independent Film & Video Festival in the Whole Wide World. It evolved into a competitive International Film Festival in April, 1968.
WorldFest was founded by award-winning producer/director Hunter Todd to present a quality film festival for the Independent filmmakers. Hunter Todd has been honored with more than 115 international awards for creative excellence in film production, and he has been the producer, director, writer and/or cameraman on more than 300 motion picture and video productions. He has served as the member of the International Jury on more than 25 world-wide film festivals, from Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Croatia, Korea, Ireland and Bulgaria. He is the longest running Film Festival Director in the whole wide world! The mission/vision statement of WorldFest is ~ To recognize and honor outstanding creative excellence in film & video, to validate brilliant abilities and to promote cultural tourism for Houston, to develop film production in the region and to add to the rich cultural fabric of the city of Houston. All members of the WorldFest staff are filmmakers.
WorldFest is one of the oldest and largest film & video competitions in the world, with more than 4,574 category entries received from 74 nations in 2020. Actually WorldFest is 10 Major film & video competitions in one event, unlike Cannes, Sundance and Toronto, which are just 2 competitions for shorts and features only.
You may enter Shorts, Features, Student Films, Experimental Films, Screenplays, Music Videos and New Media via the wonderful FilmFreeway platform. However, if you want to enter the specialized Television & Cable Categories (100 Series), the TV Commercial Categories (400 Series) and the Film & Video Categories (200 Series) (Many specialized TV, Documentary and Corporate/Business Categories, simply visit our main website at https://worldfest.org - click to Enter, then click on Enter Film Festival! You may also print out an Old School Paper entry form and send it in with your entries! Welcome to the 54th Annual WorldFest-Houston International Film & Video Festival!
WorldFest Artistic and Program Director Kathleen Haney stated, “We feel that it is impossible to properly emphasize individual films when the festival screening schedule is too large. We must consider both our festival audience and our independent filmmakers. A huge slate of 150-300 films cannot possibly do justice to each individual film. Further, it is impossible to see more than 50-60 films (with four shows a day) in a ten-day festival, so it is foolish to program more than that.” Haney continued, “We will concentrate on only the very best, selecting new American & Foreign Independent films that truly deserve a premiere at WorldFest. By doing so, we can concentrate on the films and their filmmakers and enable our faithful audience the opportunity to see each and every film!” All films/Digital entries are screened at the Cinemark Memorial City Theatres. WorldFest – the Indie Film Festival for the New Millennium!
In addition to honoring a different country each year, WorldFest will continue with its annual Short Film Showcase, a special review of 100+ new short and student films…from the festival that discovered Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ang Lee, John Lee Hancock, Randall Kleiser, Ridley Scott, Robert Rodriguez, Robert Townsend, The Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and David Lynch with their very first awards. WorldFest has emerged as the oldest film festival management in the world, with the same continuous director for more than 50 consecutive years. A few other festivals are older, but they have had as many as ten different directors. WorldFest is uniquely the only film festival in North America that is staffed and managed totally by filmmakers. All staff members have active film and video production experience, which gives them a very unique point of reference in relation to the entering filmmakers and their work. WorldFest, founded in 1961, is the oldest Independent film festival in the world, and the 3rd oldest film festival in North America.
Among the remarkable number of WorldFest discoveries, we include just a few, listed in alphabetical order: John Alvidson, John Badham, Ralph Bakshi, Carroll Ballard, John Boorman, Marty Brest, Michael Cimino, The Coen Brothers, Bryan De Palma, Jonathan Demme, Michael Demme, Atom Egoyan, John Frankenheimer, Leslie Linka Glatter, Charles Guggenheim, John Lee Hancock, Hal Hartley, Randall Kleiser, Ang Lee, Spike Lee, George Lucas, David Lynch, Paul Mazursky, Steve Poster, Robert Rodriguez, John Sayles, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, Robert Townsend, Will Vinton, Peter Weir, Hugh Wilson and hundreds more. The winners this year will be the Spielbergs of tomorrow and you can meet them before they are famous.
WorldFest-Houston…”Fiercely Independent”
WorldFest is one of the oldest film festivals in the world, founded in 1961 as a film society. We do accept productions from 2019, 2020 & 2021.
Because of our 10 major competitions and the 200+ sub-categories, WorldFest does present a lot of awards, but they are both earned and deserved. Only about 15% of total category entries actually win a Remi Award. WorldFest is the only film festival in the world that actually Juries and Scores your entry. If you score high enough, you do win a Remi Award.
An A+ Score equals a Special Jury Award. An A score is a Platinum, and A- score is a Gold, a B+ Score is a Silver and a B Score is a Bronze. We do not make Remi Awards for scores lower than a B. No awards are given in any category unless the scores from the juries are high enough to place for honors. Overall only 15-20% of the total category entries actually win an award at WorldFest.
However, everyone attending the Grand Awards Gala wins an award, because we only invite the actual winners, which makes for a delightful and very enjoyable evening, since there are no disappointed “nominees” that do not win anything. Those that do not win an award are informed by mail with personal letters prior to the festival. (For Shorts over 15 Minutes, please scroll down to LONG SHORTS to enter. We accept shorts to 69:59 Minutes, after that we consider them to be Featurettes).