Episode #13, featuring Charles Judson and Christina Humphrey, programmers I work with at the Atlanta Film Festival. Humphrey deals exclusively with short films and shares with us the emotional roller coaster of wading through thousands of submissions. If you've made a short film or you're just thinking about it, you want to listen.
Earlier this week I posted a minor rant about "sneak peaks" and why they drive me crazy. Imagine my delight to be researching a particular festival, only to discover a stealth mountain on their front page.
Fifty years ago, the New York Film Festival (which runs Sept. 27-Oct. 13) was launched at Lincoln Center as a noncompetitive “festival of festivals.” It was a time when the medium was still struggling to be taken seriously as an art form. Lincoln Center’s own chairman, John D. Rockefeller III, thought the event had no business being there, protesting, “Movies are like baseball.”
It's been a few years since I've been to the Sidewalk Film Festival – it kept conflicting with Fantastic Fest, darn it all. But since I've relocated to Atlanta and Sidewalk has relocated to an earlier time of year, I'm happily returning to Birmingham, Alabama for one of the best indie film experiences the South has to offer.
IndieWire recounts tales of screening screw-ups and bad communication a the Manhattan Film Fest, a film festival that, to judge from these stories, desperately needs to put its house in order. The use of the word "scam" in its headline, however, seems like a knee-jerk reaction at best and a cynical ploy to draw in readers at worst.
Image via MovieMaker.
John Waters, writing for MovieMaker.com. I hadn't planned on linking to this until I saw the very last rule.
Movies people like at film festivals are not always the ones they like in real life.
Ouch.
Toronto After Dark may not be on your radar as a festival to which you want to submit, but I encourage you to check out their site and see if your film fits into one of their categories.
It can't be easy distinguishing yourself in a town that not only sports the Toronto International Film Festival and Hot Docs, but an additional 60 to 70 film festivals as well. TAD seems to be going strong, though, and by all accounts they're serving their audience and their filmmakers well.
A fun "infographic" from the BBC. (In quotes because the graphic really doesn't contribute much to the info that an article couldn't have communicated equally well.)
My favorite number: 10, the cost in Euros of a beer in a Cannes nightclub. (That's about $13 US for those of you who don't convert in your head.)
Read all the way to the bottom for the number 0.
Ann Hornaday, writing for The Washington Post:
The festival, now known as AFI Docs presented by Audi, will have a new presence in Washington, its director, Sky Sitney, announced Thursday. In addition to gala screenings at the Newseum, the festival will present films at other D.C. venues, including the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American History.
It's always risky for a festival to expand to new venues and new audiences, but it sounds like the right time and the right reasons for the festival formerly known as Silverdocs.
Doug Block, writing for The D-Word:
Hot Docs staffers Charlotte Cook, Elizabeth Radshaw, Sarafina DiFelice, Stephanie McArthur, Chloe Sosa-Sims, Ellen Tang and Dorota Lech will help us kick off our annual Hot Docs topic, which continues through the festival (April 25 to May 5) and beyond."
The D-Word is a great site for doc filmmakers, and this "virtual lounge" concept looks like an interesting way to get direct access to festival programmers and staff. If you've got a question, post it now before they get too busy to answer.
Heather Croall, writing for Indiewire:
Filmmakers deserve more money for their hard work on making their films. It’s time to look at who’s really benefiting from, and piggybacking on, their success. Analyze the budgets – are there any people in the budget earning fees for hard-to-define roles? Is all film funding going directly to the filmmakers? If not, where is it getting stuck along the way? Analyze the contracts - who gets what in the back end, so to speak?
Tom Hall from the Sarasota Film Festival, responding on Indiewire to a recent article by Sean Farnel which promoted the idea that festivals should share ticketing revenue with filmmakers:
...a reality check seems in order; in almost all cases, there is no profit to share and the loss of revenue from ticketing would create another economic disadvantage in an already difficult environment. That said, festivals must work with filmmakers to help create real value for their films, value that capitalizes on the rapidly changing marketplace without repeating the failed models of the past.
I didn't link to Farnel's original piece because, frankly, it is an argument which surfaces all the time. "Festivals spend all that money on plane tickets and parties," goes the thinking, "so why can't they kick some of that ticketing revenue back to the filmmakers?" I've written rebuttals before (here's one from 2008), but the bottom line is, as Hall points out, that there is very little revenue to share. (Never mind that the accounting would be nightmarish.)
I like Hall's attempt to shift the focus from potential monetary compensation to the value that festivals should bring to filmmakers and their films in other ways. Hopefully we can put this idea to rest for another few months.
Jason Guerrasio, writing for Indiewire:
Since 2008, a string of film/screenwriting competition events, or events that call themselves film festivals but do not screen films to the public, have popped up on Withoutabox that are misleading filmmakers into thinking that they are submitting to regional festivals set in beautiful locales when in fact they are sending their work to mere online competitions that may or may not have an event to celebrate the award winners.
What is impressive about this article is not so much the number of scam festivals outed here, but the fact that it still just scratches the surface of the questionable events that take money from credulous filmmakers. Scam fests are a relative rarity in terms of their percentage of the festival populace, but many filmmakers adopt a shotgun submission strategy. The result is many a wasted submission fee – sometimes on scams, sometimes on festivals that just aren't appropriate for your film.
Tatiana Siegel, writing for SThe Hollywood Reporter:
As the flu wreaks havoc nationwide, the Park City Medical Center is trying to keep the pesky virus from crashing the party by handing out 5,000 free bottles of hand sanitizer.
[Festivalgoers are encouraged to] Get plenty of sleep and exercise, drink lots of water, and eat healthy foods.
As one commenter points out, these are three things that are basically impossible to do at a film festival.
(Hat tip to Lisa Vandever at Cinekink.)
As for Sundance, the PCMC is urging fest-goers to:
 | The Better Film Festival Submissions Toolkit has a very simple purpose: to help you improve the way you submit your work to film festivals.
Divided into 7 core tasks with a discussion of each task, the 16-page Toolkit is designed for quick reading and gives you concrete, actionable tasks to make your film submissions package better. Best of all, you'll get the insight you need to better understand what programmers look for and how to submit with confidence. |
