Budgeting Your Film Festival Run
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Paramount Pictures
Staying on top of your festival submissions can quickly become a monumental task. It’s easy to lose track of how much you have spent over the last twelve months, or which festivals you have submitted to across the various available portals. While only you can decided how much money you should be spending, a little bit of budgeting can be the difference between blowing out your discretionary income and having money left over to start developing your next project.
That’s why in a bout of boredom, I decided to build out a spreadsheet! Check it out here (Click File > Make A Copy to edit). Across the two spreads you can track your submissions, acceptances, overall submission budget, how much you have spent and what it would cost to enter all your dream festivals. There is also a nice little array that highlights the submission deadlines over the coming 90 days.
Now, this is the part where we can start becoming less financially responsible. Central Coast Film Festival also has an article about film festival warning signs, so it’s probably best to quickly brush up on that. But let’s say you are comfortable setting yourself a budget of $500. Firstly, you should always enter your local, smaller regional film festival or “underground” film festival if you have one. I’m not just saying this because I’m writing for Central Coast Film Festival. These festivals love bringing together local filmmakers and are probably the most likely to program your film in the first place. They will help you find other people who are on a similar place in their filmmaking journey and might be interested in taking a leap with you on your next big project.
If you want to have a go at entering your closest national film festival (Say Sydney or Melbourne), let’s set aside another $50-150. If you are feeling lucky or are particularly proud of your work, you can set aside another $50-100 to enter your film into another major festival like SXSW or Sundance. Be aware that these big festivals will often have a “Premiere” requirement of some sort, so check that out before you spend. Planning a festival run is just as much about timing as it is about funds. Please do not feel like you have to, or should, enter big festivals. If anything, I would argue these are the festivals you should think hardest and longest about because you will often be up against the most submissions. However, let’s just say you choose to roll the dice, and now you would only have roughly $250-$300 left to get your film a ticket around the world.
There are over 12,000 festivals on FilmFreeway, which is an overwhelming number, even once you start to sort by submission price. So, let’s just ignore the big festival database for a second. This is the part where you should work out your own goals, as well as turn to the filmmakers around you and get their experiences. While you can just submit to festivals for the sake of it, it doesn’t help us whittle down the list of 12,000 too quickly. Reddit has some great threads like What are some great under-the-radar film festivals? or Does your country have any interesting film festivals? And what films do they show?. Some of these festivals (like Wyoming International Film Festival) have active online presences and their own wealth of resources about festival submissions too.
If you want to try and maximise your own experience by getting the chance to attend film festivals, focus on submitting to film festivals in your country/region or look for festivals with travel partners or home stay programs. If you want to try to build an international audience, work out if your film fits into a “genre space” and look for festivals with strong reputations in those areas. Sometimes it can be helpful to pick a film from the last few years that is similar to yours; let’s use Pascal Plante’s film Red Rooms as an example and look at what festivals have awarded/accepted that film by using Mubi & IMDB. While these lists can still be overwhelming, you now have a list of 30 festivals to look at, versus 12,000.
However you choose to spend your money, just please don’t use up your allocated budget in the one night. Different festivals pop up throughout the year and your success or lack there of in some festivals, may convince you to change your strategy and move in a different direction. You can get the most out of your festival run by knowing what you want, setting some goals and most importantly, making sure you attend the festivals. Even if you don’t get accepted, it’s important to meet other filmmakers and expose yourself to what they are making.
