What I Learned From Submitting to 28 Film Festivals
Published September 22, 2021
Sam Campbell
To start off with some background information, I was accepted into a documentary filmmaking class taught by a local documentarian through my high school. During this class, 2 other girls and I collaborated to create a short documentary, DACAmented, which focuses on the life of a 27-year-old woman who immigrated without documents into the US as a child and is now living under DACA status.
Our teacher encouraged us to submit our film to some film festivals and we ran with that advice. We ended up submitting DACAmented to 28 different film festivals around the world. Almost all of our submission results have come back by now and we were selected by 12 film festivals and have won awards at 5 of those.
By the time we got around to submitting to film festivals, it was well past the end of the school year (thanks, COVID) so we weren’t really able to ask our documentarian teacher for advice. The three of us learned a lot trying to figure things out as we went. Now that we know the results, we were able to look back on what we did and figure out what we should have done differently:
One thing that I wasn’t expecting was how expensive submitting would be. Submission prices ranged from $5 to $65, but most were more in the range of $15 to $30. However, submitting to each category was a separate cost so there were a few festivals where we paid $80 total to submit 2 different categories. In total, we spent about $1,100 on submissions. I created a GoFundMe and luckily we had some very generous supporters who helped us cover that cost.
It can be very overwhelming looking at thousands of festivals not knowing which to submit to. We learned a lot from our results about how we could have better selected our festivals and avoided racking up that huge submission cost. When submitting, we looked for niche festivals, or ones where we would fit into a specific category, and when our results came back we did much better in those. For example, our film was a short documentary made by female students that focused on a Latina woman. Some of the categories we submitted to were: short film (under 10 mins), student film, female film, Latinx-focused film, immigration film. We also looked for some smaller festivals which would have fewer submissions than something like Sundance. However, this is not to deter you from submitting to your dream festival; all three of us grew up in Park City, UT where Sundance is held every year, so we decided to submit even if it was just to say we did.
No matter what film festival you choose to submit to, I would bet that it will be through Film Freeway. This free website has almost 12,000 different film festivals to choose from and you only have to upload your film once. You can scroll through all of the festivals, search/filter by category, and add the ones you want to your cart then check out like online shopping. It then clearly shows you your submissions, keeps track of the results, and provides you with laurels. I promise this is not sponsored, but Film Freeway will be your best friend for festival submissions.
Submitting to film festivals can seem incredibly intimidating, but there is nothing better than seeing that your film is going to be shown to people around the world. Budget for submission costs, find your niche festivals, use all of the tools that Film Freeway has to offer, and you will breeze through it. Also, doing the Gold subscription on Film Freeway is 100% worth it and will probably save you money overall (seriously I promise that they aren’t sponsoring this). Good luck with your submissions and show off your acceptances proudly!