Founded in 2004, The Lake County Film Festival is a multi-venue, multi-weekend Film Festival located in Lake County, IL. The bulk of the festival takes place at the College Of Lake County in Grayslake, IL, but we also have screenings at the Gorton Community Center in Lake Forest, IL, and have had events at over a dozen other locations over the decades.

Lake County, IL has a population of over 700,000, and they are desperately underserved in the area of independent cinema. The LCFF remains the only multi-year film festival in the area. Our patrons are engaged, eager, and excited to watch films from independent filmmakers across all different genres and walks of life. We are known for our in-depth post-film Q&A's, and we've been told multiple times from filmmakers that their Q&A's here were the best they've had.

The festival prides itself on providing a platform for a diverse group of filmmakers. From sex to race to genre: the Lake County Film Festival has stories for everybody. We strive for gender parity in our slate, and we crave more work from diverse voices.

We are proud of our history showing the early work of filmmakers like Mike Flannagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Doctor Sleep), Chad Hartigan (Morris From America, This Is Martin Bonner), Alex Karpovsky (Girls), and Leah Meyerhoff (I Believe In Unicorns, Film Fatales), but we're also incredibly proud of all the great films we've shown by people that haven't achieved the same level of recognition. It is one of our great pleasures to present films that recently screened at some of the countries' largest film festivals side by side with films that were made by people with their daughters over the weekend.

2024 is expected to be about the same size as the last few years, with a couple dozen feature films and 80-100 short films selected for exhibition and in competition for both audience and jury awards.

We love independent movies, and we want to see your film, so submit to us!