Bring Your Own Film Festival (BYOFF) is an annual event held during February every year on Puri beach. To call it just a film festival is to limit its unique magical quality. It’s a festival without hierarchy, competition, juries and awards where not only filmmakers but also artists from other fields like music, theatre, painting, sculpture, dance, literature and photography are encouraged to participate and show their work.
In short, BYOFF can be best described as an informal and intimate gathering of artists with films in the backdrop where screenings go on early into the morning hours- first, inside makeshift tents and then in the open air after sun down.
For filmmakers, it has been an alternative platform ever since its first edition in the year 2004. The idea is to have a festival away from the oppressive atmosphere of bureaucratic control of big cities and where just about anybody - with or without films - could participate.
The participants of BYOFF themselves are the volunteers and the organizers of its future editions.
And the mood of the festival is that of a no holds barred carnival where the sea and its sand provide the right ambience to lift the spirits of every one present. Yeah, for five days and five nights.