I was honored to be asked by the Woods Hole Film Festival to participate in a recent discussion with some of this year’s filmmakers about the current state of filmmaking during this pandemic, including the importance of film festivals.
This week, we’ll be looking at what makes film festivals so essential, and what you need to know about them!
Part Two: Distribution And The Business Side Of Film Festivals
As enjoyable as film festivals are for audiences, many people don’t realize just how much business takes place before, during, and after these events.
A film festival can be the launchpad to successful distribution for an independent film. And for some titles, a single festival screening can make or break the entire project.
Depending on the importance of the festival, as well as the convenience, expense, and ease of getting there, many distributors and sales agents will send an executive or two to cover various film festivals around the world in the hope of discovering some hidden gems that are just waiting to get picked up and seen by a wider audience.
These companies get sent hundreds and hundreds of screeners of completed films throughout the year, not to mention thousands of scripts of unmade projects. It is impossible for them to watch or review every one of these, even if it means that the occasional diamond will likely slip through their fingers.
A festival offers them the chance to view a carefully-curated selection of films that have already been judged and validated by its programming team, which saves the distributor or sales agent an incredible amount of time and effort.
Of course, they’re not going to like every single title - that’s the nature of film festivals (and film or any other kind of art form). But the likelihood of them being able to find something to which they respond, to which an audience has already responded, and in which they see potential is vastly increased.
Talent-spotting is one of the primary ways in which film festivals can distinguish themselves. If a particular festival develops a reputation for consistently uncovering and programming these hidden gems, then more and more distributors will attend each year, scared to miss out on some of the amazing titles that their competitors might get to see before them.
This is how a film festival like Sundance - which started out as a very small independent festival on a mountaintop - became the iconic mainstream event that it is today. As this terrific Indiewire article articulates so well, many people date Sundance’s now-massive influence on the film industry back to its screening of Steven Soderbergh’s 'sex, lies and videotape' in 1989, which was arguably a career-defining moment for Sundance, Soderbergh himself, and the distributor Miramax, who picked the film up for its US release and quickly became one of the driving forces behind independent cinema of the next twenty years.
Suddenly, Sundance was no longer a small festival in a quiet mountain town in Utah, but rather an essential part of every distributor’s calendar, fearful that they might miss out on the next big thing. As this article from Uproxx states, prior to that moment, "it wasn’t absurd to summon the indie world to a tiny resort town in the middle of winter... 'sex, lies, and videotape' changed that forever".
It just shows you the difference that a single festival screening can make. Its effects are still being felt thirty years later.
Unfortunately, it's not easy for lower-budget independent filmmakers to get into Sundance these days. But that doesn't mean that the smaller and medium-sized festivals aren't still incredibly worthwhile.
In many ways, they are often more competitive, with hungrier independent distributors working harder than ever to pick up some great titles that might have slipped under everyone else's radar.
For lower-budget films in particular, this can prove a more productive strategy - and be more likely to lead to a distribution deal - than a screening at one of the bigger festivals where, while carrying great prestige, they can sometimes get lost among the bigger-budget and flashier star-driven titles that naturally draw most of the attention from the distributors and sales agents.
Look around at some of these so-called “smaller” festivals and see which ones regularly attract distributors. Look for their success stories and speak to the filmmakers from previous years that have managed to gain distribution on the back of a successful run in one festival or another.
And any time you speak to a distributor or sales agent, ask them which festivals they regularly attend outside of the big ones. You can also ask the festivals which distributors have attended in previous years, and whether they can tell you any success stories that might inspire you to take the same journey.
Smaller local film festivals are also a place where some of the more famous and well-funded festivals (which now includes Sundance itself) can pick up films for their own programs that might otherwise gotten lost in their selection process.
Don’t be surprised to see film festival screenings populated by programmers from other festivals looking for the same hidden gems as the distributors and sales agents.
While you might think that film festivals are very competitive with one another, they generally seem quite friendly and are happy to help promote the films and filmmakers that they want to see succeed.
I should mention a caveat to this: some festivals will only screen a film on certain conditions, for example, if they can be their national premiere. As such, some of the larger festivals will mainly attend smaller festivals outside of their own country. But for other festivals that don't have such stringent requirements, they often program titles that they have viewed at other festivals and where they have seen a positive reaction from audiences and critics alike.
One legendary story is that of the Irish film 'Once', which had been rejected by almost all its local festivals and had only managed to get accepted into Galway Film Fleadh, a small festival in the west of Ireland that just happened to have Sundance executive John Nein in attendance back in 2006. You can listen to this fantastic interview where Nein recalls how attending that one screening in a town hall in Galway ended up with 'Once' going to Sundance, being picked up by Fox Searchlight, making millions of dollars at the box office and winning Academy Awards, and spawning best-selling albums, Broadway shows, and much more.
Nein proudly refers to it as “the little movie that could” - but none of it would have happened without the Galway Film Fleadh.
While finding distribution is an important part of film festivals, not all films that play at festivals are without a distributor. Many distributors strategically place their films in festivals in the build-up to their release and use them as the perfect launchpad to gain the reviews and publicity that they need to promote their title.
In those cases, a festival screening can be the ideal platform for a distributor to initiate their marketing campaign for the film. They can start creating some excitement and “buzz” by generating positive word-of-mouth, and possibly snag an award or two for additional validity.
There's no better example than the Academy Award-winning movie 'Parasite', which, as articulated beautifully in this Vulture article, had already been picked up by Neon by the time it became a smash hit and award-winner at Cannes in 2019. A strategic festival campaign was then used to catapult 'Parasite' into cinema history.
Just don’t expect a distributor to put a film into festival after festival before it has even been released. They should be very selective about any festivals in which they enter an unreleased film, giving just enough of a glimpse to whet the public’s appetite without ever threatening to over-expose it prematurely.
That’s a pitfall that some producers do occasionally fall into, and one we’ll discuss in more detail in our next post, along with some of the other things that you might not have considered about film festivals, both positive and negative.
In Part Three, we’ll look at some of the pluses and minuses of film festivals that you might not have thought about before.
Ricky Margolis is a producer and financier with over twenty years’ experience in the entertainment industry.
If you'd like to learn more about how the sales and distribution process works, and how you can use it to raise financing for your next project, check out Ricky's book on the subject.
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