Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival

The Avoriaz International Fantastic Film Festival (French: Festival international du film fantastique d'Avoriaz) was a film festival held in the French resort of Avoriaz between 1973 and 1993. It was the precursor to the current Gérardmer International Fantastic Film Festival.
Unlike many such events, the Avoriaz festival did not have grassroots origins. Organized as a vehicle for the eponymous skiing resort, it intended to promote the genre and its host town to a mainstream audience, with a level of glamour typically associated with more accepted film genres. The New York Times called it "a great success, the high point of many junketing French journalists' winters" and the Financial Times wrote that its two decades of existence had turned Avoriaz into "a momentary movie mecca". In its time, the festival was hailed as the premier fantasy film event in the world, although recent assessments have ranked Sitges, which outlasted it by a considerable margin, as the genre's foremost gathering.