 You need a financial advisor with the freedom to focus on your specific needs. Whatever your goals, Reed Potter can create a game plan tailored to you. Call Reed at 432-0777 at Pikeville, Kentucky to learn more. The University of Pikeville's Film and Media Arts Festival is just around the corner, and with that, so is the deadline for submissions. Thursday we spoke with FMA professor Andrew Reed about the festival and how you can enter. The U-Pike Film and Media Arts Festival is approaching its eighth festival, the eighth version of the festival, and our regular deadline is coming up here on February 6th. We still will be taking submissions through March 6th, that's our late deadline, but we'd like to get more submissions in sooner and the submission fees are lower for the regular deadline. That being said, all submissions from Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia filmmakers or films connected to those areas are free. For the last two years, the FMA festival has been held virtually due to COVID-19. However, Reed hopes to change that in 2022. And so when we launched the film in August, we had to plan once again what kind of event this would be, and this was right when Delta was starting, so we were planning on, we initially planned for this to be an online event, and we're hoping that the situation will change so that it can be a hybrid style event. We wouldn't be comfortable hosting a film festival right now with what's currently going on, and no one can say for sure what it's going to be like April 28th through the 30th, but we're optimistic and hopeful that we will at least have some in-person screenings as part of the festival. For the festival's eighth year in a row, students taking part in the film fest class will judge films for cash prizes. The students taking our film festivals class get a lot out of the experience. They really start to learn what it's like to be a programmer at a festival, a screener evaluating this content, and that's important because if they can learn to think like a programmer, think like somebody evaluating content, then they probably are going to make better content because they're going to start to better understand what makes a submission good, what makes it bad, they're going to see tropes that are common they may want to avoid. And so I think it's a very helpful experience because it helps them figure out what kind of work a screener is looking for to show at a festival. To submit a film, you can visit filmfreeway.com keyword UPIKE. The regular deadline for submissions is February 6th with the late deadline ending March 6th. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Horgell.