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Little Rock Film Festival Ends After 9 Years

2 min read

After nine years, the Little Rock Film Festival has come to an end due to lack of funding, resources and time.

Festival organizers announced Wednesday in statement on the festival website that the annual event is closing. Co-founded by Owen Brainard, Jamie Moses and brothers Craig and Brent Renaud, the event had been held each spring. The Renaud brothers, who are filmmakers, took the lead in programming the event.

“The Renaud brothers helped establish the festival and have been working very closely with it every year since,” said Matt DeCample, a festival spokesman. “The Renaud brothers have a very heavy production schedule over the next few years and they did not see the time and resources available to put in to the festival as they would want to in the next few years.”

According to DeCample, the festival fights to break even every year, and it doesn’t have enough sponsors. Its executive director, Gabe Gentry, resigned earlier this year.

“Craig and Brent are so busy professionally, their careers are huge at this point,” said Courtney Pledger, executive director of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute. “I think it’s a combination of that and it’s difficult and running festival. I know myself how difficult it is to raise the money every year or the festival, starting anew every year.”

Previously: How Arkansas film festivals highlight the state’s culture and put host cities on display.

Pledger, who also works with with the Hot Springs Film Festival, called the LRFF a big economic driver for the state. But without the support it needs it can’t maintain that position, she said.

“It’s hard to have these [festivals] happen every year without someone diverting the time to the fundraising and planning and running of the festival,” Pledger said.

Still, DeCample held out the possibility that the festival could return.

“A lot of annual events are hand-to-mouth, and year to year you have a lot of analysis to see if you can still do it,” DeCample said. “As the summer went on after this year’s festival, it became clearer and clearer that that it wasn’t going to work. But you never know what’s going to happen one, two or three years from now.”

In a statement from the LRFF, the organization said that the festival “helped to inspire and promote,” and that organizers were “pleased to have brought hundreds of the top independent filmmakers from around the world to central Arkansas each year to share their work directly with audiences.”

“Little Rock has a lot of great events and this was one of them,” DeCample said. “It put the city in a positive light and it was a place people enjoyed coming to.”

Pledger said she will miss the festival, but to remember the many others that take place throughout state.

“One would wish that there was a way to support these major festivals because they have a huge outreach for the state,” Pledger said.

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