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Film Festival Submissions: An Indie Filmmakers Guide
Entering the wild wild west of film festival submissions can be an overwhelming and bumpy ride — one that I know all too well.
I produced and scored a film, “As the Earth Turns” a 1938 never-released silent sci-fi film in 2018–19 (I own the film-estate). It was had an epic festival run with 122 festivals and won 136 awards/nominations.
In this article, I will give you tips from the trenches about how you can have a successful film festival submission process (and festival run).
Scams, In-Person & Online Festivals
First of all, regarding scam festivals, sure, there are some festivals that can disappear without a trace, but they are very rare. It only happened a few times for me, and both times, FilmFreeway covered the submission fee (part of the “Gold membership”). Overall, most festivals are good to submit to. There are over 10,000 festivals on the platform!
You do have to decide how wide you are going to pitch your film, and what you want to get out of it. With the pandemic, many in-person screenings disappeared, although things are fairly quickly loosening up. For the last festival run, in 2019, I was able to travel to a number of them, especially in LA. My goals as filmmaker and composer are to network with others, ideally…
