photo by: Contributed

Friends of the Kaw leadership take the stage ahead of the Wild and Scenic Film Festival last year. This year, the festival will take place Friday, Feb. 27 at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. Organizers say the annual event has been part-fundraiser, part-community gathering time for the conservation group.

For its organizers, the annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival on Friday night won’t just be a fundraiser for Friends of the Kaw, but also a chance for environmentally minded people to gather.

This is the 17th year that Friends of the Kaw, a grassroots group that works to preserve and protect the Kansas River, has been participating in the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. The festival itself is a nationwide endeavor that was started by the California advocacy group South Yuba River Citizens League in 2003.

Dawn Buehler, the executive director of Friends of the Kaw, said the yearly slate of environmental short films has become a tradition for the group’s members and gives them a chance to unite after “what usually is a long winter.” The Friends of the Kaw group is full of “river people” who are ready to get outside, Buehler said, and this helps build that excitement for when they can get back out on the water again in the spring and summer.

“They’ve been cooped up all winter,” Buehler said. “It is a film festival, but it’s also about spending time together and getting to see everyone.”

photo by: Contributed

The crowd mills about before the screening of the 2025 Wild and Scenic Film Festival hosted by the Lawrence based group Friends of the Kaw. This year, the festival will take place Friday, Feb. 27 at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. Organizers say the annual event has been part-fundraiser, part-community gathering time for the conservation group.

Buehler said that for each film festival, the group gets to sort through films from an “entire catalog” provided by the nationwide Wild and Scenic Film Festival organization. This year’s screening at Liberty Hall will include eight films presented with an intermission, Buehler said.

Two of the films stood out to her as especially relevant to the Friends of the Kaw’s work. One is called “River Cowboys: Keepin’ it Wild” and tells the story of volunteers on the Red River in Kentucky who haul tires out of the river in their canoes. Buehler said that over the past five years, volunteers with the Friends of the Kaw have removed 4,000 tires from the Kansas River, and this is a way to celebrate volunteers across the country “doing the same thing.”

The other one is “Judy’s Creek – Discovering the Secret Life of the Streambed.” The film is about exploring smaller creeks, and Buehler said it connects to Friends of the Kaw’s outreach classes at Lawrence and Free State high schools. The group has water quality education programs at both schools which include a “creek day,” where the Friends of the Kaw bring students out to do water quality testing and the students get to “stomp around in a stream,” Buehler said. The group has some free tickets set aside for students, and she hopes some of them can come to watch the film and “connect back to the time they spent in the creek.”

While the film festival is important as a tradition, Buehler said it is also an important fundraiser that helps support Friends of the Kaw’s conservation efforts, like its annual Earth Day cleanup in Lawrence, which she said would take place on April 18 this year. Buehler said that alongside the film festival, the group will host a raffle, with a new kayak as the grand prize and several smaller prizes from sponsoring businesses.

Tickets for Lawrence’s festival are on sale now at universe.com/events/51LF0G for $20. Doors open at 6 p.m. Friday at Liberty Hall, and the films start at 7 p.m. For more information, including the full list of films, visit Friends of the Kaw’s website, kansasriver.org/wsff.

photo by: Contributed

The Friends of the Kaw will host the the 17th Annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival at Liberty Hall, 644 Massachusetts St. on Friday evening. Tickets are available online.