The annual Moondance International Film Festival, which takes place in January each year, is for the benefit of both women & men, and all are encouraged to attend.

The Moondance International Film Festival invites you to attend our fabulous festival and over 50 Hollywood/Best of the West "power-tools" workshops on screenwriting & filmmaking, panels, pitch sessions, staged readings, gala awards ceremony, screenings of indie films (features, shorts, documentaries & animation), and our special events & networking parties.

Learn from the pros! Consult with the pros! Pitch to the pros!

Meet the filmmakers & screenwriters!

Moondance will be held in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, USA, on January 19-21, 2001. This popular international film-industry event is for writers, directors, producers, editors, cinematographers, actors, agents, managers and distributors!

The original "Spirit of Moondance" competition is by and for women. Our objective for this competition is to promote and encourage women screenwriters, playwrights, short-story writers and women who make independent films, and the best work by women, in any genre of feature films, animation, documentaries, short films, stage plays & short stories. Moondance provides a forum in which those women can have the opportunity for their work to be viewed and accepted by the powers that be, within the international film community.

Our work on reaching out toward women film-makers and women writers everywhere in the world is primary and ongoing. Women writers and film-makers from all six continents, and from a wide diversity of ethnic and linguistic groups are an integral part of our mission and goals. We seek to inspire and invigorate this creative potential of women to perceive, conceptualize, and produce their works for the benefit of the world society. We are dedicated to preserving their accumulated accomplishments and visions as expressed through the art of film and writings.

Equity for women in the film industry does not mean stifling some voices so that others may be heard; it does not demand the compromising of personal standards to achieve success. Equity creates new standards which accommodate and nurture differences. Equity fosters the individual voice, investing women with confidence in their own authority. Equity unleashes the creative potential. We see the equal treatment of all women and the equal respect for all responses they explore as essential to their and our ultimate goals.

Women filmmakers and women writers are vocal and active participants in the social forces that shape our culture. They portray women as three-dimensional, complex human beings and thus defy the demeaning and pervasive stereotypes perpetuated by the mainstream media. We are dedicated to promoting visibility for women in Hollywood and their impact on the film industry, and we see this as a means to disrupt and correct the misogynous, fantastical, passive, destructive and denigrating visual representation of females that has, historically, been rendered by men in media and has for so long and so plentifully pervaded our visual culture.

Moondance promotes, encourages, educates and rewards non-violent conflict resolution in the arts & film. Our much-coveted Columbine Awards are given to the film-makers &/or writers who best depict alternatives to violence as a method of dealing with conflicts, whether personal, local, national or international.

The long-term vision of the Moondance International Film Festival is to preserve and revitalize our intangible heritage, cultivate creative diversity, develop an intercultural dialogue, and stimulate this creative resource. Our mission is to present a vibrant and growing collection of films and writings, which is an ideal means for communication across perceived boundaries of race, culture, age and gender. These works document the complexity and depth of men's & women's experiences that will become widely accessible within the world film industry and to the public, and will encourage and inspire others to write and to make films.

Moondance Film Festival New Contest Categories in 2001:

-TV Episodics/Sit-coms or Dramas (scripts &/or tapes)
-TV Movie of the Week (scripts &/or tapes)
-TV Pilots (scripts &/or tapes)
-Radio dramas or documentaries (scripts &/or tapes)
-The Seahorse Contest (for men & women)
-The Dolphin Contest (for young filmakers up the the age of 18)
-Short screenplays (60 pages or less)

Moondance has been a women's competition only, but starting in 2001, due to overwhelming popular request, we will encourage both men & women filmmakers to enter the special side-bar competition, The Seahorse Contest, in which submissions of films & screenplays, stageplays, radio scripts & tapes, TV scripts & tapes, & short stories are required to depict women & girls in a positive manner &/or have lead roles for women actors over 40.

The Columbine Award Competition will also be open to men for the first time, and all films & screenplays, stageplays, radio scripts & tapes, TV scripts & tapes, & short stories for that contest must reflect non-violent conflict resolution, alternatives to violence, &/or show why a violent resolution to conflict is counter-productive & inhumane, and submitted material may not contain gratuitous violence.

The Spirit of Moondance Awards category will remain for women only. The films & screenplays, stageplays, radio scripts & tapes, TV scripts & tapes, & short stories for that category may have men who worked on it, but it must be submitted by either the woman writer, director, cinematographer, editor, &/or producer. Male co-writers are OK. There are no limits or restrictions on content or genre.