The Bentonville Film Festival (BFF) is an American

film festival A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upo ...

held annually in

Bentonville, Arkansas Bentonville is the tenth-largest city in Arkansas, United States and the county seat of Benton County. The city is centrally located in the county with Rogers adjacent to the east. The city is the birthplace of and world headquarters locatio ...

that focuses on diversity.

Foundation

Bentonville Film Festival was founded by actress

Geena Davis Virginia Elizabeth "Geena" Davis (born January 21, 1956) is an American actor

and ARC Entertainment executive Trevor Drinkwater. Bentonville was chosen as the location after

Walmart Walmart Inc. (; formerly Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.) is an American multinational retail corporation that operates a chain of hypermarkets (also called supercenters), discount department stores, and grocery stores from the United States, headquarter ...

, the founding sponsor, suggested it. After Drinkwater learned Walmart was interested in supporting diversity initiatives, he brought in Davis, who he knew would be interested because of her work with the

Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media is a US non-profit research organization that researches gender representation in media and advocates for equal representation of women. The institute is currently headquartered at Mount Saint Mary's U ...

. The BFF is the only film festival in the world to offer guaranteed multi-platform distribution to its winners. Films that win the Audience, Jury, and Best Family Film awards receive theatrical distribution from

AMC Theatres AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. (d/b/a AMC Theatres, originally an abbreviation for American Multi-Cinema; often referred to simply as AMC and known in some countries as AMC Cinemas or AMC Multi-Cinemas) is an American movie theater chain fou ...

, are shown on Lifetime television, and get a DVD or video-on-demand release from Walmart and

Vudu Vudu is an American digital video store and streaming service owned by Fandango Media, a joint-venture between NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery. The company offers transactional video on demand rentals and digital purchases of film ...

. In 2015, 87% of the films shown were distributed in some way. The festival is notable is that until 2018, there was no functioning movie theater in Bentonville. This has led to the practice of turning any gathering area in the city into a potential screening location, included the use of "Cinetransformer" mobile theaters throughout the city. The festival has experienced attendance growth each year, welcoming 85,000 attendees and showing over 90 feature films, 33 short films and 13 episodes in 2018.

References

External links

Bentonville Film Festival
- Official Website 2015 establishments in Arkansas Film festivals established in 2015 Film festivals in Arkansas Bentonville, Arkansas {{US-film-festival-stub

Foundation

See also

References

External links