4 Ways to Get Your Film Accepted into Film Festivals

Posted on by Jeff Riegel, Producer/Editor

by Zach Daulton, nofilmschool

Entering your film into festivals can be a long and emotionally draining journey. As filmmakers, we pour our heart and soul into our films, and by submitting them into festivals we find ourselves in a very vulnerable place.

Getting the Congratulations! email from a festival is an amazing feeling that can make your entire day if not your week. However, getting the Thanks for submitting but we had a lot of really good submissions this year email from a festival can be just as devastating.

“Festivals are looking to include films that make the programmers wonder, question, laugh, cry, or inspire.” 

 

Find all 4 Ways to Get Your Film Accepted into Film Festivals here.

A few more quick tips

  • Avoid Clichés. Does your film start with an alarm clock going off? Was someone dead the entire time? Is it the apocalypse? In the book How Not to Make a Short Film: Secrets from a Sundance Programmer, Roberta Marie Munroe gives a long list of clichés that festival programmers are tired of seeing.
  • Get good sound. People are more willing to forgive a film that is ugly over one they can’t understand.
  • Don’t give your actors material they can’t handle. Find the weaknesses and strengths of your actors before filming, and give them material that will seem natural for them.
  • Use FilmFreeway. This is by far the easiest and best site to use when submitting films to festivals.

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For two decades, Jeff Riegel was a former senior level Producer/Editor for the Department of Defense and various government contractors in Northern Virginia. Outside of the workplace, Jeff keeps himself busy with the creation of festival worthy documentaries "Tori Nelson: Fighting for Her Future" and once nominated and two time Emmy award winning "A Journey of Education and Remembrance." His short film "The Great Realisation" captured the eyes at 18 international film festivals with various winning honors; a poem that takes on heavy themes such as fevered capitalism, man-made ecological issues, digital addiction and, of course, the current global blight. Jeff is looking for funding investors and co-producing "The Lost Clipper," a two+ decades project about the first hijacking in U.S. history and the search for those 15 lost souls abducted in 1938, the true first act of war with Japan. Filming takes him to Micronesia, Guam, Hawaii, Canada, and locations across the U.S. He enjoys creating media-marketing social networking campaign for personalities such as 13-time world boxing champion Tori Nelson, Netflix's "Narcos" personalities Steve Murphy and Javier Pena, and renowned landscape photographer Frank Lee Ruggles. Jeff is eager to attack any project head-on. Jeff's Motto: think beyond convention...and consider it done! Jeff's Motto: think beyond convention...and consider it done!