Film and television trade publication Moviemaker Magazine has recognized the Calgary International Film Festival in their annual Top 50 list, for a fourth year in a row.
For 2025, CIFF was cited by Editor-in-Chief Tim Molloy as part of the magazine’s listing of film festivals worth the entry fee for filmmakers looking to get the best return on efforts to have their films shown.
“Calgary is one of the fastest-rising film hubs in the world — it just cracked the top five big cities on our annual list of the Best Places to Live and Work as a Moviemaker — and the festival reflects its growing importance,” wrote Molloy.
“The festival helps with travel costs for many filmmakers, and gets good press turnout, as well as industry attention from entities including the National Film Board of Canada and Raven Banner Entertainment.”
That CIFF was recognized as a hot festival to submit to came as no surprise to CIFF’s Artistic Director Brian Owens.
“We actually had a good fortune to meet the editor of Moviemaker Magazine at another event, and literally got to ask that question. What are we doing right, specifically? Basically, they said, ‘the fact that you bring travel, you bring filmmakers in on your dime, and even when you can’t, you still have passes in hotel room nights for filmmakers,’” Owens said.
“When we get reviews, filmmakers love our audiences. That’s the other thing, too. We have a growing reputation for a very receptive audience, a very bold audience that’s willing to take journeys with our filmmakers.”
That CIFF is also an Academy Award qualifying festival, doesn’t hurt, said Owens.
He said that Film Freeway, a website that helps filmmakers submit their films to festivals around the world, has filters that include both the Top 50 list from Moviemaker Magazine and for being a qualifying festival.
“Those two things are really vital for reputation, for drawing in filmmakers, because that’s a big part of their research that they’re doing when they’re thinking about their festival plan,” Owens said.
CIFF a favourite of audiences and filmmakers alike
The CIFF team of Brenda Lieberman, Adam Keresztes, Celina Vides, and Eman Safadi among others, said Owens, have been pushing bold programming choices for the festival.
“When filmmakers, almost always when they’re going to submit a film, they’re going to look at your archive and see what you’ve had in the past. One, to see does my film fit, but two, do they program good stuff? The answer is we do program good stuff, and so that gets filmmakers excited,” Owens said.
“They see that the quality of our programming is on par with TIFF, is on par with Sundance. You know, we’re not as big, and we never will be, but as long as we’re showing that quality that’s going to keep filmmakers coming back.”
CIFF is being recognized by the industry means that there is even more of a reason for Calgarians who haven’t been to the festival to give it a try this year.
“I remember last festival, the movie Griffin in Summer the second screening ended up having a really big crowd because of how much people like it in the first screening. At the second screening, the young actor, Everett Blunck, got to be in attendance and got a standing ovation at the end,” Owens said.
“The look on his face to see a Calgary crowd giving him a standing ovation, that’s worth the price of admission alone for me, and I think everybody in that audience is going to remember that moment. That’s one of those things that you get at a film festival that you don’t get from just going to a movie: you get moments that will stick with you.”
