Provincetown International Film Festival

rdf:langString Provincetown International Film Festival

rdf:langString The Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) is an annual film festival founded in 1999 and held on Cape Cod in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The festival presents American and international narrative features, documentaries and short films for five days in June of each year. The festival is a program of the Provincetown Film Society, the non-profit parent organization which also operates the year-round Waters Edge Cinema (formerly known as Whaler's Wharf Cinema), a year-round Provincetown movie theater presenting what it considers the best in current independent and international cinema. The festival hosts films and panel discussions and incorporates the cultural, historic, and artistic character of Provincetown: with its thriving art colony, its large gay and lesbian population, its original Native American and Portuguese heritage, and its congenial scenic setting. In keeping with its mission, the festival often presents films about countercultural figures, such as John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, BeBe Zahara Benet, and Andrea Dworkin. In 2022, the Provincetown International Film Festival became an Academy Awards-qualifying festival. Short films that receive Best Narrative Short, Best Queer Short and Best Documentary Short awards are automatically eligible to enter the Short Films competition for the concurrent season of the Oscars.