Inside the Mind of a Film Festival Programmer

Written by Simon Ball

The goal of filmmaking is ultimately to have people watch the film that you’ve made. For those without distribution infrastructure in place, one of the best ways to get eyes on your work is through submitting to film festivals. However, it doesn’t take long to discover that the world of film festivals is replete with disappointment, scams, and lots and lots of your hard earned money.

If you start at the top of the pyramid, established and world renowned festivals that promise glitz, glamour, and success are guarded by the fact that every filmmaker on earth wants to get in as well. If you go down the chain to the bottom, you’ll find a whole host of ‘film awards’ that will happily take your money and send you a certificate of success back in the post. Instant gratification for the filmmaker, but hardly meaningful.

Like in all industries there are good and bad offerings out there, but you as the filmmaker, staring pensively at your Film Freeway cart and your dwindling bank balance, are ultimately making decisions on poor intel.

Well, at least, I was when I started submitting to film festivals.

You have your amazing film that you reckon is ready to be screened at the best arenas on Earth, and you go and find some festivals that look appealing, send it off and then hope for the best. You then wait for an age, and then receive an acceptance letter or a rejection letter. More often than not it’ll be the rejection letter. You will receive no feedback. The festival will let you know that they’ve received a record number of submissions and that they had to make difficult decisions with regards to their programming. ‘Our decision is not a reflection on the quality of your work’, they will write.

Them’s the breaks, I suppose. But if you extrapolate this process over the course of many different festivals, you will soon be out of pocket like a gambler who can only pick one good horse out of two hundred.

Oh, not to mention if you actually get into the festival, you’ll probably have to travel there at your own expense, doubling (probably quadrupling) down on your initial bet. But we’ll cross that bridge in a different article...

After spending a fair amount of cash on festival submissions that didn’t lead anywhere, I decided to take a different approach to making films and trying to find outlets for festival distribution. While the process is, and always will be, a gamble (unless you’re best mates with a corruptible programmer), there are certain things I’ve been able to learn in order to try and make the process less painful and a bit more cost effective.

I believe that if you want to learn how anything works, you have to do it yourself. In this instance I started an international film festival. Easy enough, I thought. Make some graphics, put a call out on Film Freeway and soon you’ll be inundated with films. Then with the money I make from that, rent a cinema and Bob’s your uncle.

To cut a long story short, there’s a lot more than that that goes into it, and on some level you probably have to be slightly mad in order to organize one of these events. However I’m now several events into the process, so thought it would be interesting to write down what it’s like when your film is evaluated.

When you send your film in, it gets placed into a giant list of every other film that has been submitted. It is, for all intents and purposes, a line in a catalogue. If the festival is small, one programmer will watch everything. If the festival is large, viewing will be delegated to a dedicated programming team.

Each festival is unique and will have it’s own scoring system, but your film will be rated, judged and then contemplated. Generally speaking, there will be too many films to fit into the programming time available, and its unironically true that difficult decisions have to be made and often favorite films will have to be binned if they don’t fit into the grander programming.

When I view films for my festival I judge them through a few different lenses:

1. Competency: If there are technical imperfections in the film (bad sound, ropey cinematography, poor acting) then it makes it easy to reject the film.
2. Category: If a film is submitted to a category with strict parameters and the film doesn’t meet these, then—no matter how good the film may be—it’s an easy rejection.
3. Length: A 30 minute short takes the place of three strong 10 minute shorts. It better be worth every second of those 30 minutes. A 150 minute feature means I have to rent the cinema for 3 hours instead of 2, meaning it’s a much less profitable screening.
4. Subjectivity: Do I like the film or not? Ultimately, I have to go with my own personal taste and preferences if I want to support a film.
5. Entertainment value: Do I find the subject matter entertaining? Do I think this will provide food for thought for my audience, or is it a downer with no irony?
6. Locality: Knowing the local market means I will program films I think people in the local area will want to watch.
7. Configuration: when a program is put together, if I evaluate the representation of each film, am I ensuring that all aspects of film are represented in my program?

To expand on this final point, what I mean is that if I have four good films but only two slots in the cinema available, I have to think more business-minded than just simple art appraisal. For instance if two of the filmmakers have strong followings on social media, and two are relative unknowns, perhaps I would then split the slots in this way. Then I have to see if the filmmaker has a local connection, is likely to attend and if they will help with promoting the screening. I could also see that if one of the relative unknown films has been screened at various festivals and the other hasn’t, maybe it would mean more for the one with no screenings to screen at my festival.

There are also sometimes films that cultivate such a strong reaction in the programming team that they then form the rest of the programming around those films. These are rare, but it’s great when it happens as it’s easy to sell tickets to something that you’re passionate about.

At the end of the day running a film festival is a business operation. If a festival doesn’t receive state support, then they will need to be making money through selling tickets to screenings and events, and believe you me, marketing is an exhausting operation for an event that’s over in the blink of an eye.

Certainly by putting on a festival I’ve come away with a lot more sympathy for festival programmers. It’s a thankless task and you create a huge amount of antipathy due to how much rejection you dish out (probably why a lot of them are hard to find). People are doing their best to run an event that they think is cool, so unfortunately if your film doesn’t fit the bill then there’s no obligation for anything other than a rejection note.

All the different tricks that filmmakers may try are ultimately futile. Writing a letter in advance of your submission? Fine, but if the film doesn’t fit the bill then who cares. Researching a programmer and befriending them? Good luck, people can smell disingenuous grifters because they stink.

The best way to increase your chances is to research previous editions of the festival you want to attend, see the films they’ve been selecting and see if they align with what you’ve made. You want to get sympathetic eyes on your work. If there’s a specific category that fits your film, then send your film there. If the festival is running a slate of films with specific topics, then make a film about that specific topic.

Basically, you send your film in and hope for the best—just don’t waste your hard earned cash on those weird certificate festivals, I don’t know what they possibly achieve.

We conclude with understanding that the only thing madder than being a film festival programmer is being the filmmaker!

P.S. there are many, many routes for filmmakers to find their audience, and film festivals are but one of these. Never take a rejection note as the end of your career—it’s a challenge to you to prove how much you believe in yourself and your film, and even if you get into 200 amazing festivals, if it doesn’t lead to you making your next film then maybe it wasn’t such a good thing after all.

P.P.S. If you want to know what festival I run, then do your research yourself! I’ve had to sit through so many films that I don’t want any more! (that is, unless you’ve got something particularly potent….!)

Keep up with Simon on Instagram @simonball_visuals and his website at www.simonball.world