The Frozen River Film Festival held a sneak peek students-only preview night on Feb. 3, 2025. The festival, celebrating its 20th year, will show documentaries Feb. 9-16. The festival spends a year prior to the festival accepting submissions. This year over 300 films were submitted, with about 60 making the cut for the final screenings.
The films shown at the preview included: Near the River is a story of Zambian kayakers and a dam that threatens their livelihood. Toy Hospital, where toys are given new life. Stud Country which delves into the world of queer country western line dancing and its loss to gentrification. Broken Flight highlighted how the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors works to study and rescue birds that collide with windows. To Scale: Time follows a group of friends as they build a scale model of time itself in a dry lakebed.
The films ranged from 18 minutes to 4 minutes in length. Some were emotional, drawing the audience into near tears, while others were laughter inducing.
Eileen Moeller, the managing director of the festival, enjoys cultivating a well-rounded set of films.
“So there’s this really wide range of really serious, heavy topics that we should know and care about, but we try to balance that out with a little glimpse into something beautiful and quirky and silly, and I think that’s wonderful too.” Moeller said.
Moeller has worked with the festival for the past 5 years, and has helped cultivate it into something more than just a festival. As of this year they will start showing fiction films year round, offer film education opportunities and film making camps for kids during the summer.
The festival is free to all Winona State University students. They can register for a free student pass and have access to all in person and online film screenings.
“We definitely want to make it accessible to young people, because there is a lot of value to seeing a diverse array of stories. They are educational, or feature an issue other people are facing in other parts of the world that we don’t hear about in traditional news.” Moeller said.
Keaton Riebel, a marketing assistant or Frozen River and a Winona State alumni, first learned about the festival her freshman year. She took an internship last year, and got the opportunity this year to design all the merchandise for the 20th anniversary.
“It’s important to support local communities and organizations like FRFF because otherwise, we don’t get to continue to put on these events. People also don’t realize that most organizations like ours are non-profits which is why our costs may be higher.” Riebel said.
The festival is almost entirely run by volunteers, including the 25 volunteers that make up the screening committee, along with all the volunteers who help run the screenings and make things run smoothly.
Passes can be bought here, where students can get a student pass for free. Other members of the community can buy 3 different kind of passes, with varying levels of access.
