Category Archives: Film Festivals

My latest blog post for IFP’s “Ask the Expert” series is up now. This month, I offer my thoughts on how to deal with the film festival circuit after your film’s first screening. Take a look here.

Update: The original post seems to have gone missing from IFP’s site, so I’ve posted the article below.

Dear Filmmakers:

My most recent posts have focused on your film’s festival premiere. This time around, let’s move past your first festival and consider how to deal with the festival circuit beyond.

As mentioned previously, often by being included in that first festival, your film will be noticed by other festivals, leading to invitations to screen (if the other fests’ programmers are in attendance and like the film) or at the very least to submit for consideration (if they couldn’t attend your screenings or the festival itself). This is especially the case if your premiere took place at a high-profile festival like Cannes, Toronto, or Sundance. These events engender a lot of attention from other festivals, and much of their lineups become the wishlist for these other festivals’ own programming. This is also very much the case with niche festivals – part of the challenge of programming an LGBT or Latino/a festival is doing the detective work of finding work that fits the festival’s niche. A niche programmer for a festival in Chicago can look at the lineup for a similar niche festival in NYC or LA that takes place nine months before her own festival and safely assume that the work featured would be appropriate for her festival as well, and invite most of the films to submit. When I ran NewFest: The NY LGBT Film Festival, our sourcelist was regularly requested by other LGBT festivals around the world, and I combed through theirs as well on the hunt for work I wasn’t aware of.

If you are directly contacted by other festivals to submit to their event based on your inclusion in the lineup of your premiere festival, they should, at the very least, offer to waive their submission fee. If they don’t, I would recommend you respond to their inquiry and ask to have the fee waived. This is fairly standard practice, and, as you should know by now, every dollar saved helps.

Before deciding to submit, make sure you take a look at the festival’s website, and, ideally, their past lineups if an archive is available. While I’d venture that most festivals would, at minimum, read the description of your film that your premiere festival used, some may not – instead, they may just blanket invite all films from that premiere festival to submit to their own event, and not all the films will necessarily be appropriate. If it strikes you as odd that you’re being asked to submit your ultra-realist kitchen sink drama to a sci-fi genre festival, you should feel free to respond to their inquiry, briefly clarify what your film is, and question why they think it’s appropriate for their own event. Even if they’ve waived the fee, you would still be spending money on postage, and if there’s virtually no chance that your film would be selected, why bother putting another DVD out there?

Also, as I wrote about in my first post for IFP back in August, before you submit to any festivals, you should consult the database of film festivals you and/or your team have put together. This database should reflect festivals with specialized audiences/interests (ie, niche constituencies that are central to your film, such as African-Americans, women, Christians, Southerners, shorts fests, comedy fests, etc), festivals in target cities that you would especially like to have a presence, and major and minor festivals that could generate significant industry or press interest, etc. Add the festivals inviting you to submit or to screen into your database, and see how they do or don’t fit in with other plans. For example, if you are being wooed by a grassroots LA-based women’s film festival that takes place in March, but you have aspirations to play LA’s Outfest in July, you probably want to think hard about whether screening at the former will preclude you from screening at the latter due to local premiere issues.

Some festivals care about premieres, and others don’t. Much could be written about the fight for film premieres at various levels (world, international, national, regional, and local), and how in some cases, it can force a filmmaker into having to make really difficult decisions. Often, but not always, smaller and niche fests don’t really care about premieres, or aren’t really in a position to be able to enforce premiere restrictions. They are happy to screen the films that they like, that fit their niche-based mission, even if another festival in their same city screened some of the same films a few months ago. Sure, they would love to have the local premieres, but as long as they think they can get an audience for your film, they will generally be flexible. On the other hand, many larger festivals, or mid-sized festivals with grander ambitions, will insist on at least having local premieres (usually the bigger the festival is, the higher level of premiere they will insist upon). One factor here is managing the films that festival can consider – if a larger festival has 40 slots, stipulating that they must have world premieres for those slots might mean receiving 1200 submissions instead of 2400.

All this talk about premieres boils down to you being strategic about where to submit and where to screen your film. If you really want to screen in NYC, there are scores of festivals or film series to consider. You can submit to all of them if you have those funds, but be careful when it comes to where you agree to show. If you are accepted to a smaller festival in February but really want to screen in April in Tribeca, you’re going to have to weigh the likelihood of getting into the larger festival or not. You should notify Tribeca about your selection, but they are not necessarily going to tell you early that you’ll be accepted or rejected. If they feel strongly about your film, they may, but they may also not be ready to extend you a definite slot.

I’ll continue my thoughts about how you should navigate the festival circuit after your premiere in my post next month.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Basil Tsiokos is a Programming Associate, Documentary Features for Sundance, consults with documentary filmmakers and festivals, and co-produced the feature documentary “The Canal Street Madam.” Follow him on Twitter @1basil1 and read his “Dear Documentary Filmmakers” advice at WhatNotToDoc.com.