Founded 2015 | ||
 | ||
Location Oil City, Pennsylvania, United States Language International, with English Subtitles Website oilvalleyfilmfestival.weebly.com | ||
The Oil Valley Film Festival is an annual American film festival in Oil City, Pennsylvania.
Contents
The festival takes place in at the historic National Transit Building and the Oil City Library. The festival comprises competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature-length films and short films, and a curated block of out-of-competition selections. Audience favorites in feature and short categories, as voted on by the attending audiences, receive prizes separate from jury prizes. The festival also includes a screenwriting competition.
Festival Programming
The Oil Valley Film Festival consists of film programming over a three-day period. Day one provides the juried short film program. Day two provides the juried feature film program, with a social event for filmmakers and audience members to interact. Day three provides the audience members to watch a curated program consisting of films chosen by the festival's director. Beginning in 2017, the festival will begin various panels of discussion featuring filmmakers, actors, and producers from the selected films. Topics of each panel will vary.
History
The Oil Valley Film Festival was founded by Matt Croyle in 2015, in an effort to bring new and established cinema to the underrepresented region of Venango County, Pennsylvania, with the first festival taking place September 1–3, 2016. It is the first international film festival of its kind in Pennsylvania's Oil Region. Croyle stated that his ambition was to bring art house works to an audience who would not normally be able to see non-mainstream films.
The founding of the festival garnered attention from established industry publications and organizations, ultimately resulting in partnerships with Videomaker Magazine and The Writers Store.
In the festival's inaugural year, the feature film Audience Prize was awarded to Vincent Pereira for his 1997 film A Better Place, one of the lesser known View Askew Productions films, produced by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. A Better Place screened out of jury competition, in the curated block, but was chosen by the audience as their favorite feature of the festival. Filmmaker Zach Daulton, of Ohio, was awarded the short film Audience Prize for his film 'Mayfield.'
In its first year, the Oil Valley Film Festival received submissions from twelve different countries on five continents.