Atlanta Film Festival programmer Charles Judson, writing for CinemATL.com:
. . . filmmakers have to realize that any film festival worth a damn is always juggling several goals and missions. That a festival’s curatorial mission is more than just subjectively selecting the “best” films. That diversity doesn’t just extend to who are the leads and who is behind the camera.
It also encompasses the genres being programmed, the different categories the festival includes and representing the myriad of styles and approaches filmmakers have tackled in their work. It’s being aware of the conversations and real world events taking place globally and locally when thinking about what films to select for the documentaries. It’s knowing what the festival has screened the last few years and balancing keeping the festival fresh, current, forward thinking and respectful of our cinematic heritage, all at the same time.
Judson's words come in response to criticism from the local filmmaking community that the festival doesn't support their work. If you want to learn more about the thought processes of a programmers and the pressures they often work under, read this.
The Cannes Film Festival -- indisputably one of the most anticipated film events of the year -- is associated with glamour, prestige, and artistic brilliance. The seaside festival is also famous for serving up numerous scandals and controversies.
Calling these "major scandals" is a bit much, but it's a nice reminder of the festival's occasional rocky times and entertaining kerfluffles. I love the characterization of the Cannes audience as "artsy progressives." Not that I think the description is wrong, necessarily, but it's questionable journalism.
Milos Stehlik, writing for The BEZ about a provocative open letter written by French feminist group "La Barbe":
In presenting only films by male filmmakers, the writers said, the festival "show(s) once again that men love depth in women, but only in their cleavage.” Festival Director Thierry Fremaux responded by saying he agrees women lack opportunities to make films; however, he said, the problem exists year-round, not just during the ten days of the festival. Cannes could not, he said, start choosing films based strictly on the gender of the filmmaker. Undoubtedly this will not be the last word on the issue.
in emails Withoutabox threatened participating Indee.tv festivals to "deactivate all third party submission services in order to avoid disruption to your Withoutabox service." And 10 festivals dropped the new service.
Reddy calls Withoutabox's exclusivity claims "ridiculous." "The tech industry would NEVER stand for this," he said, in an email. "Imagine Hotmail threatening to block access to your emails if you tried Gmail. The tech world will chew them to bits. Amazon knows this, but somehow feel like they can get away with bullying small festivals outside the tech world. They have a lousy product and rather than work on building a better one they stoop to these exclusivity clauses."
There are some interesting quotes from festival directors here about the problems they have with Withoutabox (WAB), the automated submissions system for filmmakers sending their films to film festivals.
As DC Shorts director Jon Gann points out in the article, this situation is unlikely to change until someone steps up to "challenge the goliaths." In this case, I think that means that a handful of prominent festivals (with typical annual submissions numbers upwards of 2000) would have to commit to using a different system. This will be accompanied by a blow to the number of submissions they receive, but introducing competition to the world of festival submissions might be worth it to them in the long run. The hard part of WAB's business to copy is its access to a large number of filmmakers with films ready to submit to fests. But if the only way to submit to some of the larger festivals were through an alternative solution, even that database of filmmaker prospects could be replicated over time.
(As an aside, I suspect that number of "400,000" filmmakers is mostly bogus. There may be 400,000 registered emails in the WAB system, but the chances that all – or even most – of those people are still actively submitting films to festivals is, in my humble estimation, pretty unlikely. It would have been nice to hear from a filmmaker or two in this article, since they are the people ultimately paying the bills.)
I think it's important to say here that, other than those emails enforcing the exclusivity clause, Withoutabox (WAB) isn't behaving in a particularly evil way. The people who work there are generally terrific and the service is the backbone of the film judging process. Unfortunately, WAB is a cog in the great Amazon/IMDb machine. Amazon is perfectly content to let that cog continue spinning as it has always spun, feeding other parts of Amazon's business. And without competition to threaten the way that cog spins, there is very little incentive to devote development resources to improving WAB's software, service, or pricing.
Regardless, festival staffers will likely continue their love/hate relationship with Withoutabox for some years to come. Here's one of my favorite rants from the festival perspective: the criminally under-watched "Bitch Fest" from Project Twenty1.
This tongue-in-cheek flow chart is one of the cleverer ways I've seen of communicating a film programming ethos. There are plenty of "joke" dead-ends here (I especially like the hackneyed-but-still-funny thrashing of the Comic Sans typeface), but also a serious path through to festival acceptance that reveals the qualities in a film that these programmers want.
The creators of the Lower East Side Film Festival (often shortened, somewhat misleadingly, as LESFilmFest) seem to have done a great job in their inaugural year of creating an identity for their festival. I also see some interesting experiments going on here (like the "QuickSubmit" tool that allows filmmakers with private screening videos on YouTube or Vimeo to bypass the usual submissions process).
I'm looking forward to seeing what they do in 2013.
The Milwaukee Film Festival just opened its call for entries, and this year they're doing a little experiment: no entry fees.
From their press release:
“The Milwaukee Film Festival is continuing its dedication to being filmmaker-friendly by offering free entry to all films this year,” says Artistic and Executive Director Jonathan Jackson. “We want filmmakers to save their money for filmmaking. They should put that $100 into their next film.”
New from Film Threat: an entertaining series of videos about the film festival process, written and directed by my friends Mark Potts & Don Swaynos. Above: episode 1, in which a filmmaker wraps his shoot and gets a little bit ahead of himself.
One of the best (and funniest) practical guides to SXSW for newbies I've seen in a long time. David Modigliani is the director of a great film called Crawford and one of the principal creators of Flow Nonfiction.
That's the title of the panel I'll be sitting in on at South By Southwest this year. If you're in Austin for the festival on Tuesday, come by and learn what I and my esteemed colleagues (listed here) have to say about the state of short film and distribution.
Chris & Jesse revive the podcast after almost 2 years. In this episode: the expedited death of 35mm exhibition, the protracted death of the Withoutabox message boards, and how to time your submissions to festivals.
You see, these lesser-known film festivals are the hidden gems of the movie world. I’m not going to claim that the overall roster of movies at Oxford is as good as the lineup at a typical Sundance, but the difference between them isn’t as great as you might think, either. If you’re a film buff who can’t afford to travel to the top festivals, you would do well to check out whatever is happening in your own backyard.
The Oxford, Mississippi film fest has been one of my personal favorites for a few years now. The festival's focus on bringing great independent films to an underserved audience – regardless of the pedigree of those films – never waivers.
Today is the last day to submit your film to the Vimeo Festival and Awards in one of 12 different categories. Some interesting judges in here, including Edgar Wright and Aziz Ansari.
Film festival organizers and filmmakers should understand the Alamo Drafthouse philosophy – in an industry where theater attendance is declining, the Alamo is reliably doing great business. Not only that, this theater chain is expanding into film festivals, distribution, and merchandising.
According to Avant-Mier, festivals look for good screenwriting, and value theoretical concepts and depth, although he admits the assumption that independent films carry depth is not always true.
The article itself is probably of limited interest to anyone outside El Paso, but if you've ever watched a number of films submitted to festivals, you're nodding your head at that sentence. The article's headline is a bit misleading since the piece is more about the state of local filmmaking in El Paso than about festivals, but still worth a quick skim.
As far as we have come with on-demand movies, and as comfortable as most people have become with viewing films at home, the allure of the movie theater is still not lost on a majority of filmmakers. Playing in an actual cinema remains the ultimate dream, but the low costs and accessibility of VOD are so appealing to studios and distributors that this dream is even less likely to come true.
I think we'll see roughly as many indie features make it to screen as we ever have – for those films "worthy" of a big screen release, there is a definite correlation between a good run at the cinema and subsequent home video sales. However, with more indie films getting picked up for VOD distribution, the overall percentage of films that have theatrical distribution before they are made available to home audiences will shrink.
It's been a while since I've mentioned the 7 Days to a Film Festival Strategy seminar. Unlike my live seminars, this one is delivered as an email "class" once per day for seven days. For the rest of February, this seminar is available for just $2.99.
If you're submitting to film festivals and feeling like you're not getting anywhere, this seminar will help you zero in on the festivals that matter most to your particular film.
From crowd-funding to the visual language of online video, internet culture is slowly but surely seeping into independent film.
Nothing illustrates the web’s growing influence on filmmakers more effectively than Me @the Zoo, a feature-length documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Then there’s the story of David and Nathan Zellner, filmmaker siblings from Austin, who prove that starry-eyed Sundance still embraces deeply idiosyncratic work made on a shoestring budget. After screening some of their short films at the festival, the filmmakers introduced their eccentric debut feature, “Goliath,” there in 2008. A comedy about an aimless thirtysomething (played by David) whose life begins to come unglued after his cat goes missing, “Goliath” received encouraging reviews and eventually secured a video-on-demand and DVD release through IFC Films.
But the brothers didn’t immediately book one-way tickets to Los Angeles. Instead, they chose to remain in Austin, where they continued to make shorts and direct music videos for their favorite local bands.
a wormhole has opened up between Sundance Past and the Online Present. Through it, films seemingly lost in time — or swallowed up by the gaping maw of bad distribution deals, or no distribution deals — might find commercial redemption.
Thanks to a recent arrangement between the Sundance Institute, which operates the festival, and the Manhattan distributor New Video, six Web homes — Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and SundanceNOW — are making Mr. Noonan’s movie, and any other eligible Sundance film, available for streaming online. The option is open to every film ever shown at the festival, or brought to a Sundance lab, or given a Sundance grant. Filmmakers don’t surrender their rights. They (17 so far, with thousands of potential participants) can opt to go with any or all of the half-dozen sites. They have, in essence, a guaranteed means of distribution.
