Ballston Spa Film Festival

A Family Friendly Festival

The Ballston Spa Film Festival is free to attend. We do this to enable families with children to have a fun night or two out with little expense.

Half of our screenings are held in an outdoor public park. This means even people who had not intended on seeing the films might see a few minutes just passing by. We take our responsibility to the community seriously and are making every effort to ensure offensive material is not screened in the park. By their nature independent short films are rarely rated by the MPAA. This means they are not assigned a G, PG,PG-13 or R rating.

We have programmed our festival films so that those shorts playing in the park would be best suited to audiences of all ages. If these films were rated they might have a G or PG rating.

Other films while not visually explicit, do address themes of sex or violence. These films might earn a rating of PG-13 but not likely an R. They are similar to video games rated T for Teen. The visual depictions are in keeping with what you might see on broadcast TV but some of the language occassionally veers into the R rated realm.  We are therefore only screening these films indoors and will refer to these screenings as being intended for "Mature Audiences".

Films in this category may depict murder by guns, suggest sex, torture or drug use. Language sometimes includes words that would be BLEEPED on broadcast TV.