Ridgefield Independent Film Festival announces 30 films to screen at October festival

With films from New York, Los Angeles, UK, Canada, Austria, Mexico and Iran, RIFF’s highly organized 2021 festival has a local flavor this year.

“The theme that runs through all of the films we chose this year is resilience, and we wanted to showcase the resilience of local filmmakers,” says Executive Director Geoffrey Morris.

A highlight of the festival will be Ridgefield director Joanna James’ ‘A Fine Line’, a feature-length documentary that explores why less than 7 percent of chefs / restaurant owners are women, while traditionally women have influenced them. top male chefs in the kitchen.

Another highlight will be the Saturday Night Marquee film at Ridgefield Theater Barn, “How to Stop a Recurring Dream,” in which the eldest daughter in a family, facing a separation of custody, kidnaps her hostile younger sister to embark on a a trip to reconnect before they leave.

Friday’s Psych Night, another Theater Barn offering that has proven popular in the past, will be an entertaining feast of short films exploring the bizarre, the scary, the funny and the fantastic.

Saturday afternoon at the Ridgefield Library and Ridgefield Theater Barn will feature a variety of resilience-centric films such as ‘Last Call,’ a documentary about bar owners and workers in Queens New York fighting to stay afloat during Covid. In addition to taking us on trips around the world to the most uninhabitable place on Earth with “After Antarctica”; in Iran with “Red Lipstick”, the story of a woman deciding to marry or not; in Austria with “Alles hat Grenzen NUR DER MONDFISCH NICHT”, an opera on climate change, sung by the earth; and beyond this world with “Planet b234” which explores latino masculinity and fatherhood.

Sunday ends at the Theater Barn with “RIP T Shirts,” the latest Kate Davis and David Heilbroner film that brought us “Say Her Name” the Sandra Bland story in 2018; and “Authenticity,” a delightful musical for and about teens facing cyberbullying, at the Ridgefield Library.

Join us: in person or online. October 8-10, 2021 in the city we live in, Ridgefield, CT, Indi since 1777.

The full list of films, by title and director, is below:

The Ridgefield Independent Film Festival was founded in 2015 by local playwright and filmmaker Joanne Hudson and premiered its first iteration in May 2016 at seven locations in Ridgefield, Connecticut; screening of 72 films from 26 countries. Since then (under the festival directors: Megan Smith-Harris, Jill Mango and Sean Murphy and the direction of the executive director, Geoffrey Morris since 2018), the festival has attracted celebrities like Allison Williams, Paul Dano and Jeffrey Tambor, as well as talented artists. local and international filmmakers. This year’s festival will be an intimate and highly organized festival with the same independent spirit it started in: in the hopes of making the world a more compassionate place through sharing stories through cinema.

The RIFF will take place October 8-10 in Ridgefield, Connecticut. For more information, please visit

https://www.riffct.org