The 13th Annual Annapolis Film Festival is pressing play on its 2025 event starting March 27.
This year’s festival features more than 70 films across 19 Annapolis venues, along with panels, coffee talks, and other events.
Festival founders and directors Patti White and Lee Anderson are long-time friends with a wealth of film industry experience. White is a three-time Emmy award winner. They met via a mutual hairdresser, but the pair hit it off and worked together on the original run of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover” in the mid-2000s.
In 2012, partially spurred by the 2004 closure of the independent-film-friendly Eastport Cinema, White and Anderson gathered a small group of filmmakers at the restaurant 49 West to pitch their idea for the city’s own film festival.
“We realized we’re just back to zero film culture in this town, so we wanted to bring it back,” White said.
“We wanted something that could bring our community together,” Anderson added. “We started it with that mission of making a festival for all of the community, not just one part of it. … We think that we’re on the right track, and we feel we’ve built something very special.”
Every year since then, the festival has shown dozens of local and international films. Besides the festival, White and Anderson’s film camp, Filmsters Academy, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.
Before the pandemic, the festival frequently attracted more than 10,000 attendees, but it’s not until this year that White and Anderson are expecting to hit that number again and can handle upwards of 14,000. Last year, the festival came in at just under that number.
It costs nearly $1 million to put the festival on every year, and only 10% of the festival’s revenues come from ticket sales, instead relying on individual and corporate donations.
Submissions for the festival began in July and closed around Thanksgiving. A screening committee combed through nearly 500 submissions to narrow down the lineup.
“It’s like a puzzle. You put it all out there, and you see what kind of a film festival we’re going to have this year and what we want to have in it,” White said.
This year’s theme is “A New World,” focusing on films that not only look to the future but also reimagine the world that already exists. Highlights from the founders include:
- “I’m Not A Robot,” an Academy-Award-winning short about a woman who repeatedly fails a CAPTCHA test.
- “The Ballad of Wallis Island,” focuses on a lottery winner who uses his money to reunite his favorite band.
- “Lilly,” the festival’s closing film, is about pay equality advocate Lilly Ledbetter.
- “The Threesome,” is about what it sounds like — and produced by Annapolis natives Tim and Trevor White.
The full slate of films and their showtimes can be found on annapolisfilmfestival.com. Tickets can be purchased per-film or as part of a larger pass.
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