10 Tips for Submitting Your Short Film to Festivals
Visionary Fellow Filipe Coutinho’s advice for building a successful festival submission strategy.
Credit: Carl Malmer (@carlmalmer)
By Inevitable Foundation Staff and Filipe Coutinho
Submitting your short film to festivals is an opportunity to screen your film to wider audiences, expose your work and vision to top industry executives and creatives, and help you build momentum for your career. But the process isn’t free, and costs can rack up quickly.
While some festivals offer fee waivers or discounts that can help filmmakers cover a portion of their submission expenses, there are other ways you can strategize to maximize your festival application budget. It’s something that Visionary Fellow and Elevate Collective member Filipe Coutinho has been thinking about in the lead-up to his own potential festival run.
“The Visionary program encourages us to submit our shorts to festivals, so I knew that was a goal on the horizon,” says Countinho, who, on Wednesday, premiered his short film 8 Tracks at The Academy Museum as part of the Visionary Fellowship Industry Showcase. “Once we wrapped shooting and got a better sense of our deadlines for picture lock, sound, and so on, I wanted to understand what festivals I could submit to once the movie was ready. Which also inspired the question, ‘What festival is actually right for my movie?’”
This isn’t the first time Coutinho has submitted to a festival, but the last time was over a decade ago. To account for any industry or strategy shifts as he embarks on the next leg of his film’s journey, he approached fellow filmmakers, producers, creative executives, and directors of development at production companies for their advice. He also joined a conversation with Ana Souza, the manager of the Sundance Institute’s programming department.
“The role of film festivals has changed dramatically for feature films in the last several years—fewer sales, lower figure deals, and the pipeline to distribution now having to account for theaters versus streaming,” he says. “I was interested in understanding how shorts were affected, knowing they’re a completely different ball game. I wanted to forget what I thought I knew and just learn from scratch what the new reality is. Turns out, some things are still the same—people still spend way too much money on festivals.”
Below, Coutinho shares a handful of suggestions for filmmakers to consider while navigating the festival submission process with their short film.
Filipe Coutinho on the set of his short film 8 Tracks. Credit: A. Klass
I. Know the reputation of the festival you’re submitting to. It's worth reading about the festival before submitting. Not all festivals—even the more prestigious ones—treat filmmakers well, and those can end up being bad experiences for directors, even if the film is selected and screened. The comments section on FilmFreeway can be a big help here.
II. Be attuned to how your film aligns with what a festival is looking for. Tone and genre are super important. A slapstick comedy, for example, could have a tough time being programmed at Sundance. Cannes will likely favor shorts that take visual and structural risks. SXSW can be a great home for crowd-pleasers, whether those have a more comedic or horror bent.
There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but every filmmaker should familiarize themselves with each festival's goals, intentions, and the types of films they've screened in the past. It’s also worth noting that festivals tend to look for patterns once all selections are made, as well as projects that individuals on the programming team have a passion for and can champion.
III. Consider the length of your short film in terms of its acceptance odds. A lot of festivals state that the length of your short isn’t a major consideration, and that what truly matters is how good the movie is and whether it “earns” its runtime. But frequently, longer shorts (15 minutes or more) are viewed as program anchors—or the film that serves as the central, lead, grounding or definitive narrative within a curated collection of similary themed projects.
If there are, for example, eight programs, that means there are eight slots for anchor movies. Depending on the volume of incoming submissions, the chances of your short being accepted can decrease drastically. At Sundance, programmers receive between 12,000 to 16,000 short film submissions every year, and only select around 60 titles. Of those 60, only a handful or fewer will be longer than 15 minutes.
IV. When submitting rough cuts, clarify what you’re still working on. It's critical to have a title card at the beginning of your movie with bullet points indicating what is still being worked on (e.g., sound is still being mixed; color is still being corrected). Additionally, while many festivals will accept works in progress, they will require them to be at least picture locked.
V. Make sure your sound quality is ready for a screening environment. A common complaint from film festival programmers is that the sound quality in short films tends to be poor. For particularly reputable festivals, those movies will never get programmed. Investing in a skilled production sound mixer and ensuring a decent budget is allocated for a post-production sound package can make a big difference.
VI. Put effort into your press kit. Press kit PDF contents for when your film is accepted should include the following in this order:
Logline
Synopsis
Director's Statement
Director's Bio
Cast and Crew List
Stills and Poster
VII. Consider the festival’s premiere requirements. If you’re lucky enough to have been accepted into two different major film festivals, you might not be able to do both. Sometimes festivals require that your film be a world or other type of premiere, so think carefully about which festival makes more sense for your film, regardless of the festival’s prestige.
VIII. Whenever possible, submit early. When you submit for a late deadline, you're paying more, in some cases even twice as much. You can also be submitting after most of the slate has already been selected. This means your movie has to be so good that it bumps a previous selection from contention. With that said, if you feel a festival strongly aligns with the film you've made, it’s still worth submitting, no matter the deadline.
IX. There are festivals you should outright avoid. Look out for those that have high fees but no track record, don’t list past winners or judges, or are vague about screening venues and platforms. The film festival circuit can be a competitive environment, which means there can be people ready to pounce on your ambition with little or no return for you.
X. There’s never going to be a perfect formula. At the end of the day, this industry is unpredictable, and everybody’s path is unique. The only thing we have is our intuition. So listen to the advice, and consider it alongside the work you’ve already done, but ultimately follow the path that feels right to you. This isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success; it’s just a guide that can hopefully be helpful in some way, big or small, to other filmmakers.
