Less exclusive, more inclusive.

The festival began in 1983 as the Edmonton Learners Centre’s “Third World Film Festival”. In 1998, the centre became the Global Visions Festival Society, and the non-profit film festival took on the same name.

Global Visions Film Festival has become Canada’s longest running documentary film festival, and in May 2014, expanded to present Edmontonians with as many of the newest, hottest, most talked-about documentaries as possible.

In May of 2015, to reflect the changing face of the festival, GVF re-branded to NorthwestFest to not only include the best in non-fiction filmmaking, but also local music, art, and media wherever possible. We now also run the Rainbow Visions Film Festival, focusing on LGBTQ2S+ content, and NorthwestFEARFest, an annual genre festival.

Since 2013, our society has presented exclusive Edmonton premieres of films such as:

• Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck

• Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief

• Hired Gun

• Made in Japan 

• Chasing Ice

• How to Survive a Plague

• The Act of Killing

• Central Park Five

• When I Walk

• Jodorowsky’s Dune, and

• Call Me Kuchu - just to name a few!