ORLANDO, FL – The International Christian Film and Music Festival celebrated its 10th year last week at the Wyndham Resort on International Drive in Orlando.
The festival, which had over 3,000 attendees this year, featured a music conference, three concerts, two awards shows, screened over 200 films, facilitated 20 seminars, a red carpet, and it’s first ever afterparty, was a huge success in they eyes of attendees.
“An incredible week!” said one attendee. “We met so many incredible people and left feeling so filled. The staff put on an amazing event and we felt so honored to be a part of it.”
ICFF, started in 2012 after founder Marty Jean-Louis found out that a previous Christian film festival in Orlando was cancelled and was called to start a new one. After ignoring the call for to year, he decided that the team should do a festival online.
Expecting maybe 30 submissions after the 2012 posting, the first iteration of ICFF received 70 submissions, some from from Europe.
The calls from participants came for a physical festival, so the ICFF team reserved a room to screen films in downtown Orlando, and had 100 attendees in 2013, by 2015, the same hotel could barely hold the 1,500 attendees.
In 2019, ICFF reached a peak of close to 6,000 attendees and 700 film submissions, making it the largest Christian film festival in the world.
In this year’s event, the ICFF team worked to take things to the next level.
The festival introduced its own custom awards, named the “ICFF Angel Award”, a shiny hew metallic award with a gold and clack base and and wings rising from the center. The award was designed by Jean-Louis with the ICFF team and some overseas designers and was carefully kept under wraps until the awards ceramonies.
Notable award winners were Kevin Sorbo, was honored with the 2022 “Lifetime Achievement in Film award”. Actress Nancy Stafford received thee “Outstanding Woman in Film Award”.
The film “The Last Champion” starring Cole Hauser took home the Best Picture Angel, while Aneesh Daniel took home the Best Director, feature film award for “The Least of These: the Graham Staines Story”. Aneesh traveled from India to attend the festival.
A link to the list of award winners is listed below.
The festival added some special touches to celebrate their 10th year, including laying out over 400 “Hollywood walk of fame – style” stickers on the floors of the Wyndham convention center, each depicting the winner of an ICFF award from 2012 – 2021.
The festival featured a praise and worship concert by Holy Fire, a Classic Petra Revival concert with Greg Voltz leading the classic 80’s band, and a powerful Christian Hip Hop and ministry concert by Kingdom Music featuring Tampa artist Datin among with other rappers who ministered to a thrilled crowd.
The awards also drove VIP and speakers to the red carpet and dropped them off in Tesla’s to a live stream broadcasted interview, welcoming them to the red carpet by actress Meggie Jenny.
Jim Chandler and Jen Gotten-Chandler hosted the evening ICFF awards show, bringing their energetic and comedic style to the event, and local media personality Riesa Pascal hosted the afternoon award show.
Pittsburgh family group “Holy Fire” provided prayer and worship music throughout the week, starting each day of the festival with prayer and music.
ICFF 2022 was a huge success, and the team is already starting the plan for 2023 and beyond.
For more info, visit internationcff.com
Link to the full list of winners: https://www.internationalcff.org/2022-winners/
