Distribution: It Could Happen - Festivals

Peter Biesterfeld
March 2008

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Rambunctious friends and relatives, even the family dog, gather in front of the digital hearth for your premiere. As they're hooting and hollering and throwing popcorn, you dare to wonder if there might be larger audiences in grander places who might appreciate your opus.

Try to imagine a packed nineteenth-century theater where Mark Twain once gave a speech, and it's your movie flickering up there on the digital silver screen. When the credits go up, there's applause and questions about your film. During the schmooze-fest afterwards, a sales agent comes up to you and says she might be able to find a buyer for your movie. It could happen. But you have to work for it.

Without an audience, your movie is like the proverbial hand clapping in the forest. How does anybody know it exists? If you're genuinely serious about finding an audience for your film, you have to stop thinking that finishing the movie is the end of your labors.

One of the best things you can do for your film and for your own development as a filmmaker is to have your movie screened at one of the several hundred festivals that dot the North American landscape.

Festivals can do three things for you: deliver audiences for your film, connect you to the industry marketplace and provide learning opportunities for improving your craft. Before launching into the do's and don'ts of getting your film past programmers and screeners and in front of festival audiences, we should first pan across the terrain to explore what kinds of festival experiences are out there.

Filmfest.com reports that, in the last ten years, the number of U.S. festivals jumped from 450 to 650. One of the reasons for the jump is the new kids on the festival block. Boutique fest, student fests and online fests are not only boosting the numbers, but they're also making distribution of original screen stories achievable for non-professional filmmakers. Some of the younger fests are grabbing a foothold by attracting a mix of pros, semi-pros and first-timers. The six-year-old Big Mini-DV Festival out of Long Island University, for example, encourages "filmmakers of all genres and technical levels" to submit their videos.

At the other end of the festival rainbow sit festivals with long traditions, such as the stately but vibrant WorldFest Houston Film Festival. Founded in 1961, WorldFest boasts that it gave Stephen Spielberg, George Lucas, Spike Lee, David Lynch and the Coen Brothers (among others) their first awards.

Festivals can also be niche fests programmed around issues, themes or regions. Take the Midwest Independent Film Festival, which will consider films of all lengths and genres, but prefers submissions from "the eight-state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin."

The goal of your submission is to have it selected from a competing crop and win an award in one of the categories. Although most festivals are competitions, there are non-competitive events, such as the Tulsa Overground. This combination film and music event bills itself as "a festival for the people, by the people. A cinematic grab bag of first-time filmmakers, student directors, professional lensers and big name auteurs." "Anything goes" programmers at the Overground accept only shorts and caution that only two hours of films are screened each night, so the shorter your film, the better its chances for selection.

Once your film is accepted, most festivals will give you an industry pass. This gets you into the formal and informal sessions where filmmakers of all stripes get to mix with industry pros, distributors and sales agents. Whether it's a Q-and-A session with a seasoned filmmaker after a screening, an industry panel on current trends or a boot camp on distribution and marketing, you'll find these sessions indispensable to your career trajectory.

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