Big Sky Documentary Film Festival

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Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is an annual non-fiction film festival held in Missoula, Montana each February. The event showcases documentary films from around the world. The festival first began in 2003 as a seven day event. In 2011, the event lasted for ten days. The Big Sky Documentary Film Festival has become the largest cinema event in Montana. In 2012, the festival drew an audience of 20,000 and received nearly 1000 film entries from every corner of the globe. The festival hosts over seventy-five visiting artists, and presents an average of 125 non-fiction films annually at the historic Wilma Theater, The Top Hat, and Crystal Theater in downtown Missoula.

BSDFF hosts DocShop an industry-focused feature of the festival that offers documentary filmmakers opportunities for networking, discussion, and professional development. The schedule includes workshops, Work-In-Progress presentations, panels, and the annual Big Sky Documentary Pitch session. These events deal with topics from funding to distribution, and everything in between.

Recent Award winners at the festival have included A World Not Ours (Mahdi Fleifel), Blood Brother (Steve Hoover), Slomo (Joshua Izenberg), Chasing Ice (Jeff Orlowski), This Way Of Life (Thomas Burstyn), Last Train Home (Lixin Fan), and Gasland (Josh Fox), Rough Aunties (Kim Longinotto), Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor), Jimmy Rosenberg: The Father, The Son, and the Talent (Jeroen Berkvens), Favela Rising (Jeff Zimbalist), The Cats of Mirikitani, (Linda Hattendorf), Citizen King (Orlando Bagwell & W. Noland Walker), Horns and Halos, (Michael Galinsky & Suki Hawley).

Special retrospective programs have included: Agi Orsi, Barbara Kopple, Brendan Canty, Caveh Zahedi, Christoph Green, Chuck Workman, Dana & Hart Perry, Doug Pray, Jerry Blumenthal, Joe Berlinger, Kartemquin Films, Les Blank, Maysles Brothers, Robert B. Weide, Ron Mann, Stanley Nelson, and Steve James.

Special guests have included Indy Rock legends Yo La Tengo, Comedians Tig Notaro and Chris Fairbanks, Academy Award® winning director Steve James (Hoop Dreams).

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