February 17–20, 2027 · Inaugural year
Ten features and thirty-eight shorts, four days, two screens and one unforgettable experience in New Mexico’s hidden mountain playground.
Making a film is hard, the kind of hard that drains a bank account and asks you to believe in something before anyone else does. Most festivals treat that effort as a formality. We think it deserves better. Every filmmaker we select gets a travel stipend, a meal credit, and discounted lodging, and every film plays twice to a real audience with a real Q&A. You’ll spend four days alongside working New Mexico crew, building relationships that turn into your next call sheet, in a state with one of the best film incentives in the country. Come for the festival. Leave with what you need to make your next film here.
The Block Concept
Submit a short or a feature. We build blocks that are diverse but connected, not by genre, but by a shared question, feeling, or way of seeing the world. Most features screen with four curated shorts before them, giving short films a full room. Every director takes the stage to introduce their film, and every block ends with a conversation between the films and the people who made them.
For filmmakers
RIFF is built for the people who make the films. Everyone we program is treated as a guest of the festival, not an applicant who got lucky.
Programming
Filmmakers submit to a category; our programmers build each slate around a shared question or feeling.
Films about land, distance, and what people do with the space between themselves and everyone else. Not just Westerns. Anywhere geography becomes a kind of character.
Films by Indigenous filmmakers and films centering Indigenous stories from across the region and around the world.
Features made for under $150,000 and shorts made for under $10,000. Our signature competitive slate, for stories whose ambition was never limited by budget.
Films from outside the United States, in any language, subtitled. You can only see so far from any one mountain. This is what’s on the other side.
Films that sit in dread, suspense, or the unknown. Programmed in the last slot of the night. A winter mountain town after midnight does most of the work for us.
Films by New Mexico filmmakers and films rooted in New Mexico stories, in English and Spanish.
Documentary features and shorts built from what actually happened, and the questions of what we choose to remember.
Comedy and warm hearted drama. The block you can bring anyone to, including someone who has never been to a film festival in their life.
Submissions
No late fees. All New Mexico-made films receive a waived submission fee. We accept work from anywhere; non-English films require English subtitles.
Submission detailsNotifications: December 8–18, 2026. The New Mexico High School Filmmaking Challenge is free.
February 17–20, 2027