RiverRun International Film Festival

It started as a small festival named for a river it would eventually leave behind. The French Broad runs near Brevard, North Carolina, and that's where Gennaro, Vincent, and Elizabeth D'Onofrio founded RiverRun in 1998. By 2003, the festival needed a new home.

Dale Pollock — then dean of the School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and a former film producer — brought RiverRun to Winston-Salem. The city had spent decades building an arts identity alongside its tobacco and textile past; a serious film festival fit what it was becoming. Winston-Salem is home to UNCSA, Wake Forest University, and Winston-Salem State University, among other institutions — a city with the infrastructure and appetite to sustain this kind of programming.

RiverRun took root. The festival runs each spring as a nonprofit media arts organization, presenting feature-length and short films across genres, alongside panel discussions, celebrity tributes, regional premieres, and family events. Since 2014, it has held Oscar-qualifying status in the animated short film category. That designation matters — it means the work screened here carries real consequences for the filmmakers who submit it.

The reason to go isn't the credential. It's the range: international submissions, documentary features, shorts that haven't found distribution yet. RiverRun also screens virtually for those who can't get to Winston-Salem in person, but the in-person festival is where the programming lands hardest. Show up without a fixed agenda and let the schedule decide what you see next. That's how film festivals are supposed to work — and this one, now well into its third decade, still operates like it has something to prove.