The 17th Big Water Film Festival is here! We'll be at the Bay Theater in Ashland on January 17 and 18, 2025, and online from January 19 to February 2. We are excited about our film selections this year.

Schedule of Events:

7:00 pm: The Live Festival: Friday Night

The Grand Salmon

Three kicwomen, who are both expert kayakers and scientists, paddle from the upper reaches of the Salmon River, through the Snake River, and to the mouth of the Columbia, illustrating the challenges faced by the Snake River Basin salmon. Appealing to both the adventurer and the activist, this film will get your heart and your mind racing. In the most dramatic way possible, this film presents the case for the removal of the four Lower Snake River dams, in order to give the wild salmon population a chance to survive.

The Bear in the Shower

One of our best-loved filmmakers at Big Water (Best Short in 2011 for Bike Race, and Best Short-Short in 2015 for Isola del Giglio), Tom Schroeder has charmed even those audience members who think they don't like animated films. In this one, Tom explores the predicament of a woman who finds herself stuck in a friend's bathroom. Tom's pacing of his story is perfect and the way he moves his character and us from a kind of dreamy acceptance to a closing tension obliges us to watch until the last second of the end credits.

Trans Heaven, Pennsylvania

In the 1970s and 1980s, the small Pennsylvania town of New Hope was among a few safe havens outside of major cities for gay men to find community. Over 30 years later, the town’s legacy remained, but now for a different community: transgender women. Trans Heaven, Pennsylvania explores the untold story of legendary, weekend-long parties that saw hundreds of transgender women and self-identified crossdressers take over the town, traveling from all over the country to meet other people like themselves. Through interviews, animation sequences, and archival photographs, audiences get a glimpse into the heyday of these events in the early 2010s.

Never Not Yours

Three adult siblings are summoned to the family cabin to be told by their parents that they are divorcing. This is a warm and funny film, rich in the kind of family dynamics that get ignited when children, now adults, return to their childhood settings and spend more time with each other and their parents than they have in a long time. This is a first feature length film for both co-directors but their long experience in directing shorts shows in the film's maturity, restraint, and economy.

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