Elliot Grove lists on Raindance the 16 Things Film Festivals Hate About Filmmakers.
Here are the points but please visit the site for the full elaboration:
- Filmmakers who don’t read the festival rules and regulations
- Filmmakers who don’t complete submission details
- Filmmakers who send wrong or incorrect email and telephone numbers
- Filmmakers who are incommunicado
- Filmmakers who are too communicative
- Filmmakers who are having fights with their team
- Filmmakers who haven’t cleared music rights
- Filmmakers who send faulty preview discs
- Filmmakers who want us to watch their films on DVD
- Filmmakers who send bad production stills
- Filmmakers with no social network
- Filmmakers without a press kit
- Filmmakers who are rude
- Filmmakers who don’t understand the role of a festival
- Filmmakers who fall for cons
- Filmmakers who ignore relationships
In other words, if you want to be loved by film festivals, do the exact opposite of this list.
My take: FilmFreeway lists over 13,000 film festivals. The biggest piece of advice that I think is missing from Elliot’s list above is: choose wisely. In other words, understand the goals for your film, set a budget and then narrow down your list of festivals to the ones that have shown films like yours in the past. Be honest with yourself about the film’s quality and uniqueness. After all, it will be competing against potentially thousands of other submissions: “For TIFF, we get between 4,000 to 4,500 films every year. Sundance gets 10,000 to 11,000 every year.”