Festival Data:

• Established: 1986
• Genre: General
• Attendance: 9000
• Total Number of Films Submitted: 475
• Total Number of Films Screened: 200

• Competitive
• Has Panels

Festival Website:

Festival Description:

In 1986, Bart Weiss and Melissa Berry collaborated to present a weekend of video programming titled "Video as a Creative Medium." Little did they know, their modest event would eventually blossom into the Dallas Video Festival, the oldest and one of the largest festivals devoted to the video medium. That weekend of video as creative art evolved into the Dallas Video Festival, which became official in 1987. At the first Dallas Video Festival was held at the Dallas Museum of Art and the infamous Starck Club. In its twenty years, the Dallas Video Festival has distinguished itself nationally as a veritable vortex of video, a proverbial pantheon of pixels, a place that will make your head spin, your eyeballs ache, and your mind expand.

The DVF is not just about video, but about media that has substance, media that matters, media that needs a place to exist and media makers that need a voice. It's about the best (and sometimes the worst) in the moving image. We believe in looking critically at our media, looking critically at our world, understanding how media affects us and our children, where it can take us in the future, how it can harm us, how it can empower us, how it can move us, and how it can change the world. 

DVF screens features and short digital films and video in all genres, such as documentary, animation, new media, narrative and commercials. Independent, alternative and innovative work is encouraged to submit.

As the founders say, "We're not a film festival... We're an every kind of moving image festival! We’re not just video—we’re animation, we’re interactive, we’re digital, we’re art, activism, we're online, we're archival, we're on iPod and cell phones, we're even LED graffiti. Formats--we're seen 'em all. So, all we can do is throw in the towel at trying to define them, and embrace them all."