After nine consecutive years, the Little Rock Film Festival will not be back in 2016.
According to Matt DeCample, a spokesperson for the LRFF, Craig and Brent Renaud, two of the founders, no longer have the time to give the event the attention it needs, especially after the executive director Gabe Gentry resigned earlier this year.
The Renaud brothers are both filmmakers and have a heavy production schedule over the next few years, limiting the other projects they can be involved with.
“They did not see the time and resources available to put in to the festival as they would want to in the next few years,”DeCample said.
The festival also was not receiving the kind of support it needed — DeCample said it fought to break even each year, and was lacking some big sponsors that it needed.
However, it’s not completely out of the picture for the LRFF to come back some day.
“A lot of annual events are hand-to-mouth, and year to year you have a lot of analysis to see if you can still do it,” DeCample said. “As the summer went on after this year’s festival, it became clearer and clearer that that it wasn’t going to work. But you never know what’s going to happen one, two or three years from now.”
Courtney Pledger, the executive director of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute, said she would be sad to see the festival go, but also to remember that the state is home to a host of other film festivals.
For more details about the end of the LRFF, check out this article from our sister publication, Arkansas Business.