While volumes can be written on the logistical, psychological, bureaucratic, nepotistic, and economic challenges and limitations of entering film festivals in this day and age, I'd like to share one personal motivation and one anecdote.
I began entering festivals on the cusp of a time when sending in one's entry on a 16mm reel was soon to be precluded by mini-dv tapes and DVDs. Given that my lifelong singular vocational goal (since first grade!) was to teach, festival entry and acceptance from the outset was all about beefing up my resume in order to appear as a working artist. After a 10-year teaching career, I've spent the last four as a touring artist-activist, endeavoring and enjoying far, far more personal, professional, and monetary satisfaction than any number of festival acceptances or appearances could ever offer me. In short, being one's own 'traveling film festival' is evermore attractive in the face of competing entries, the lack of accountability, and a host of other problematic issues already broached on this forum that preclude the worthiness of entering festivals. All that said, I still enter festivals with a more pointed eye towards those that thematically and historically support work of the nature I am entering, again, largely with the intention to support my applications for grants, residencies, and other related professional endeavors. Funny thing is, though I'm making the strongest work of my career (as measured by critical and popular response), my festival acceptance rate has shrunk considerably even as the award rate has increased. Most alarming is that some festivals that have traditionally accepted all of my earlier, less evolved work have full on stopped accepting my more recent work. As an example, one higher profile experimental fest didn't accept a piece that I finished this past October. So for only the second time in my career, I decided to followup with the festival. I received an exceedingly generous note from the festival director saying they (I'm being gender neutral here) had previewed 75 per cent of the entries but not mine, and would personally review my film. Well, they fell over themselves with praise for my piece, so I asked why it had not been accepted. Turns out that the other 25 per cent of entries was farmed out to a group of non-filmmaking students to preview! The director (whom I should point out was only in their second year as director) was aghast and admitted to being in the process of turning things around for the better. Furthermore, they pre-accepted my film for the following year. Point is, this is a well-established festival in the experimental world. How long had it been farming out previews to students, let alone non-filmmaking ones?! Please don't ask me to name the festival. Some years back, I named another even more reknowned fest in this forum that suddenly stopped showing my work after screening almost all my early pieces, and my attempts to follow up created a lot of unnecessarily bad blood between myself and the fest, resulting in what appears to be an unrepairably burnt bridge. Sorry for the long post, comrades. I've been trying to hold off sharing any of my experience over the course of this thread as it the festival game as been just that: a game with winners and losers, alas. But to conclude on an up note: festivals at their heart are about collectively sharing and experiencing work with our audiences. So as a working antidote for our festival entry blues, why not conscious exploration of the wealth of possibilities for true independence that are available to filmmakers today thanks to the relative merits of technology and the internet. Personally, I have no interest in the internet as a site for online festivals and screenings. But as a means of building audiences, distribution and sales, and researching venues and institutions in person screening presentations, the internet has been indispensable. There's also a ton of micro cinemas and artist-curators out there--many of whom walk the virtual hallowed halls of this forum--that program work in a more thematically and interpersonally conscientious manner. Cheers, Ken www.maddancementalhealthfilmtrilogy.com www.kenpaulrosenthal.com
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