Dajonea Robinson, a first-year doctoral student in SIU Carbondale’s mass communication and media arts program, is leading this year’s Big Muddy Film Festival, which runs March 27-29. (Photo by Russell Bailey)
March 20, 2025
SIU’s Big Muddy Film Festival returns in 2025 with 85 films
CARBONDALE, Ill. — The longstanding Big Muddy Film Festival returns to Southern Illinois University Carbondale and will showcase some of the finest works of independent filmmakers and students.
The 46th festival runs Thursday through Saturday, March 27-29, at The Varsity Center, 418 S. Illinois Ave. The free, public event remains one of the nation’s oldest film festivals affiliated with a university and is widely known for strong documentaries that highlight social issues. This year’s celebration features 85 films, including 13 student creations, totaling nearly 16 hours of screening time.
Additional information is available on the festival’s website and Instagram.
This year’s theme is “Freedom of Expression.” Dajonea Robinson, a first-year doctoral student in mass communication and media arts who is heading this year’s event, said the goal is for audiences to “feel the emotions on an intrinsic level our filmmakers have expressed through their art.”
“We hope audience members are able to find an essence of themselves on the big screen,” she said. “These stories are both local and international, but at their core, they’re representations of the human experience.”
A wide array of topics
The festival features narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, super short and environmentally conscious films, along with movies “that grapple with grief and pride and are outright funny,” Robinson said.
Robinson noted that student films “have a home again within our festival.”
The work of SIU Carbondale students “deserves to be highlighted on the big screen,” she said. “We are proud of our peers, and I hope this tradition continues even after I graduate.”
The festival will again present the Mike Covell Award given to an alumni filmmaker in honor of festival founder and retired faculty member and the John Michaels Social Justice Award given in honor of a cinema student in the 1980s who earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at SIU Carbondale and who was involved in community organizing and activism before he died of brain cancer.
In addition, the festival will present the Cade Bursell River Award in honor of Bursell, a retired SIU cinema professor. The award “celebrates groundbreaking films that illuminate pressing environmental issues through innovative storytelling and a deep commitment to social justice,” Robinson said.
Bursell’s “focus on human rights and environmental concerns is enriched by her interdisciplinary approach, drawing insights from queer studies, women’s studies, environmental and animal studies, and Buddhist philosophy,” Robinson said.
Rebuilding the festival
Robinson sees this year’s effort as an opportunity to return the festival “to its glory days with a twist.”
“As we rebuild, we hope to increase community engagement, host mini festivals in different cities or countries, and have cross disciplinary collaborations with music, live performances or even art exhibitions,” she said.
Robinson, who is from Oakland, California, earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at SIU Carbondale. She was attracted to SIU because of “its drive,” she said.
“Excellent people have come out of SIU Carbondale,” she said. “There are resources both realized and unrealized that are at our fingertips. We must have the audacity to take it, shape it and make it ours. I’m tapping into once unrealized potential that I do not think I would have gotten if I had not attended SIU. I’m shooting for the stars, and SIU is another foundational block in my story.”
Jurors viewed films remotely
The three jurors for this year’s festival are Franklin Fitzgerald, a NASA Edge producer, documentarian and photographer; Robert Dennis, a 1984 SIU Carbondale cinema and photography alumnus whose varied Hollywood career includes working with Lucasfilm, HBO Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and other leading entertainment companies, and Mehrnaz Saeedvafa, an award-winning filmmaker whose work focuses on women’s cinema and Iranian films.
The jurors watched each movie remotely and decided on the winning films based on the festival organizer’s criteria, Robinson said. They will also give remote workshops in April.
(Editor’s note: Dajonea is pronounced Day-Juh-Nay.)