Film Festival Basics

I've realised that many of you who are not in the film industry might not understand much when I write about the struggles of indie filmmakers with film festivals. I'm writing as if you're all filmmakers, ha ha.

Here are the basics: if you somehow manage to make your first film (short, long, documentary, doesn't matter), that film is not considered a professional artistic film until vetted by at least one festival which has a certain degree of recognition in the industry. The festivals are the gatekeepers.

There are thousands of festivals. A lot of them are listed on submission platforms like FilmFreeway or Festhome or FilmFestivalLife, where filmmakers put their films (secret links with passwords) together with info about the films, and when they wanna submit to a festival, they just do a couple of clicks.

Most festivals receive hundreds and thousands of submissions, and for that they hire programmers to watch all those films and select only a few. In continental Europe, Asia and South America a lot of festivals get funded from the state budget, but in North America, UK and Australia, almost all of them take huge submission fees from the filmmakers.

So you pay in order for someone to watch the film and decide if it's going to be selected or not. The fee is usually between $35 and $100 ($75 being the average), but it can go as low as $2 and as high as $200 per film. When the festival gets enough money from the state and doesn't ask for a fee, it is paid from taxes by the community, because it is assumed that any healthy community needs art.

And in all this process there are so many issues:

- thousands of scam festivals that look good but have no recognition in the industry and are organised mainly to cash in your submission fees

- lots of established festivals that disregard submissions and get instead bigger movies directly from distributors, sales agents, contacts, from other festivals etc. (and you don't know that, you pay to submit thinking you have a change, but you actually don't)

- and even if you don't pay to submit, the community pays the festival via taxes to discover new talents or to bring new artists, not Hollywood movies, so it is still highly unethical when free-to-submit festivals disregard submissions from indie filmmakers

- some programmers don't even watch your submitted film (or watch only a couple of minutes of it) and you don't have a way to check that

- once selected, most festivals won't pay for your travel and hotel and you have to spend a fortune to attend, especially if it's on another continent

That's the story, on short. :) With my film festival lists I am trying to help independent filmmakers (including myself) to find the best festivals to submit their films, and to give some tips of how to submit in the most efficient ways, and how to stay away from scams.

Here are the updated lists:

- https://adriantofei.com/top-100-international-film-festivals/

- https://adriantofei.com/writings/top-100-international-horror-film-festivals/