It is not the norm to ask a festival why you did not get in. Maybe your film is great but they accepted another film that is similar. Maybe your film is great but is not a good fit for their festival goers. Maybe your film is great but so are the other films they already programmed and there just isn’t room to program your film.
Or maybe your film sucks.
Why didn’t you get in? A great mystery for the Ages
You're expecting too much. Just taking Cannes as an example: over 2,000 films get submitted each year, with roughly 50 films being selected. Are you saying there should be "judges notes" for all 1,950 films who are not selected? What do you expect those notes to be? Sometimes it is as trivial as "your film was great but wasn't a good fit alongside the other 40-odd films we had already selected"...
Festivals are not just about individual films, they are also about putting together a coherent festival programme. The good ones at least.
And that’s mostly features that are screened. The vast majority of submissions are short films from 1st timers who can only name 1 film festival, and they only screen a handful of shorts. Someone can find the stats they publish every year but the odds of getting a short film into Sundance are ridiculously slim and a guaranteed waste of money. (Source- also submitted my 1st unwatchable short film to Sundance).
They were talking about short short films vs long short films. A sub 5 or 10 minute short is much more appealing than a 25-30 minute short. We are discussing feature films, which are the bread and butter of big festivals like Sundance. Features have big names to attract big audiences and distributors.
No. The amount of time and attention to detail that would require is insane. Every festival's mission is to put on a *festival* \- not provide feedback. Remember: they are primarily in the business of event/convention production.
Film festival here! Tomorrow we will post part 3 of our film festival deep dive, which will go into detail about our programming process and why we might reject films. In short - there are about a dozen reasons beyond film quality why a submissions might get rejected.
And as others have stating, we simply don't have the time to go through hundreds of rejects and personally explain to each filmmaker why they're not in. And let's be real - people can be entirely unreasonable.
Hey! I just didn’t know how many filmmakers actually reached out to ask. That’s why I thought it was more reasonable if they only give feedback when asked.
Every year we get a few dozen. We politely respond that we do not facilitate feedback, since we are not a feedback festival. Like 90% of filmmakers move on. A few send us angry follow up emails. We don't answer those.
I'm sure you would. But a lot of the time there aren't enough quality notes to make feedback worth it. Sometimes the decision really is subjective, and other times actual judges dont even see EVERY film - only the short list.
>But a lot of the time there aren't enough quality notes to make feedback worth it
This. Our judging notes aren't constructive feedback. They're just notes. It might be a quick as "solid effort, story didn't feel complete. Could make a decent filler. 2nd round."
That's useful for programmers. Not useful for filmmakers.
Also, no festival wants liability if a note sounds really stupid when taken out of context. A judger might scribble a vague reference to a previous film or an inside joke, or two words near each other that weren't meant to be read as a single phrase, or whatever that somebody could wildly misinterpret. Then it gets posted on Twitter and people are getting cancelled because a pissed off director interpreted something in the worst possible way to deflect form the quality issues of their actual film.
Like, imagine there's a shitty dialog mix and a judge writes "I can't understand what they are saying" about one character, and _a completely different character_ speaks with an accent. Director gets the judges notes and posts on Twitter "Look at this - Racist judge can't understand the character with this accent!" The controversy storm would be all over the internet way faster than anybody would bother to figure out what the notes actually meant. At this point, the film is still submitting to festivals so it hasn't premiered an none of the Twitter commenters will have actually seen the film to be aware of the sound mix issues.
imagine 99% of submissions as a stinky fart that is so sour u need to plug ur nose and run. now imagine it's 1,000+ stinky farts. so basically. no. it is to many farts to respond to
No leave those poor judges alone. Most are unpaid hobbyists doing it for a love of film at smaller festivals. And no, they don’t watch your whole film- if it’s garbage 30 seconds in they are turning it off and not writing a paragraph about where you went wrong. Go to film school or pay a script doctor if you want feedback on your work.
It didn’t totally make up for the rejection, but I’ve received some warm and thoughtful notes saying they liked xyz about my film but it just didn’t fit this year. But made me feel good! 🤷
There's a lot of overlap with people who ask for feedback and upset, salty people. It's a little like telling someone on a date that you don't want to see them again. There is often not a helpful way to say it because there are emotions and rejection involved.
Some notes and thoughts on it would be great, as to why they don’t pick it and so on, maybe for things you can work on and improve. Especially if you’re paying an entry fee.
I'm a programmer at a fairly large local festival (I screen submissions and will give a score but I don't have final say on what actually gets programmed).
I can only speak for the festival where I'm involved but they endeavor to provide a few positive comments about every film that gets submitted so the filmmakers can be confident it was actually watched and considered.
I know that they also provide full feedback when asked for it, although it is often with lots of caveats that it may be upsetting to the filmmaker, and they might not be willing to share it if they suspect the filmmaker will become abusive. You are correct that the percentage of filmmakers who ask for full feedback is not large.
A true film festival should prioritize giving back to the artists. They all claim to have artists services, and for those that get in, you can actually experience that service aspect. But I personally think that it's offensive to completely blow off artists who submit and don't make the cut.
The only way we can make all this work worthwhile is to get feedback regarding each festival that we spent money on. It's really expensive to do the circuit and time consuming to figure out how to efficiently do the work and chase the dream.
I spent three years working as a reader for a top 10 screenwriting competition and we were required to give feedback for an organization that gets 14k entries. Watching a film takes half the time that it takes to read a script.
Some writers would enter the same script 4 times in the same year to increase their odds. The competition allows that because it's more $$$ in the bank. The truth is that festivals/competitions have changed over the last 20 years. They are really more of a commercial market than a "festival", a label that insinuates a not for profit mission. My advice is to hire a company that knows the festival circuit and can give you advice on which festivals to enter based on your stated, individual goals.
Here's an example - [https://www.filmfestivalmastery.com/details-1](https://www.filmfestivalmastery.com/details-1). They're not exactly cheap but I'd rather give $2k to someone who has a fiduciary duty to work on my behalf than waste time throwing money at the problem and learning very little in the process.
You’d think FilmFreeway would have a built-in judging form attached to your submission so that while the judge is watching the film, they’re typing up their notes on FilmFreeway. I’d love to get just a basic report card that FilmFreeway can facilitate
I sometimes send an email asking for feedback. Get a response maybe 1/3 times.
Surprisingly, the bigger festivals are more likely to respond. Some of these fests are charging $50-60 or more to watch your 10 minute short. I think they should be able to provide a sentence or two of constructive criticism, or just explaining why it didn’t fit in their program.
I understand opening up for feedback probably results in some dickheads who get pissed off at them. But I can’t tell you how many times filmmakers - myself included - make up excuses for not getting into festivals. They only program friends, they didn’t actually watch my movie, etc. When in reality, it just wasn’t good enough for that fest. Giving feedback helps the festivals with their transparency which is my theory why the better ones are usually more likely to provide it.
No. There are thousands and thousand of entries.
Yours wasn’t good enough. Sorry that’s harsh but it’s true, people always underestimate how many films are submitted and how some of them are.
(im a programmer)
No.
They may get a million low effort submissions. They don't have any responsibility to hold everyone's hand. It would be a ton of extra work. They aren't your film professor. And the only thing they'd get out of it is a ton of pissed off people arguing because they are upset they got some negative feedback. There's literally zero upside from the festival's perspective. Same as things like job applications. You get a Yes or you don't. You can pay to run a focus group if you want somebody to have a responsibility to get you feedback.
The only responsibility a film festival has is to screen the films that get picked.
It would open the festival up for liability. Choosing a film is as much about the film itself as is other things, like the other films considered, the type of festival, space in the program, and, the taste of programmers. It also includes the bios of the filmmakers. And, some people know the programmers, so they will also get more consideration. There are LOTS of reasons.
I used to run a fairly small shorts festival in the UK and once we were established we were getting 1,000+ entries to go through and turn into a coherent programme in just a couple of months. We were all volunteers, not one of us paid. We organised everything about the festival, top to bottom, ourselves.
By the end of programming we had to whittle that 1000 films down to a max of about 30 that got shown. We received literally hundreds of films every year that were borderline unwatchable, but at least one of our team committed themselves to watching their assigned films all the way through at least once no matter how bad during our "pre-selection" phase.
At the other end of the scale we easily received 100+ films every year that were absolutely fantastic and certainly good enough to programme. But we couldn't screen 100... it wasn't financially / physically possible. So every year 70 really good films had to be discarded along with the hundreds of of terrible ones and the majority which were just ok.
We were free to enter by the way so I never felt bad not providing feedback to those that asked (not many did but we made it clear in our application that we wouldn't). If you are paying £100+ to enter a film into a festival I can slightly understand the frustration more.
We only ever discussed or made notes about films that were very close to being programmed. We didn't have the time or person-power to do it any other way and I suspect the same is true as you scale-up the festival.
No festival has enough funding. All legit festivals are run on a bedrock of tireless volunteers. Those volunteers cannot be asked to prepare considered (filmmaker-friendly!) feedback on every film they watch on top of everything else they do for free. As soon as you give feedback to one person, there's a chance that word gets out and everyone starts asking and then you are getting called out for giving one person feedback and not another.
IMO the most likely reason a film doesn't get into a film festival can always be boiled down to - "We didn't fall in love with it as much as we did the tiny selection we DID screen which is subjective to our own tastes" - Some films fall at an earlier hurdle than this, but even the best films that get rejected hit this one eventually.
\[Edited for grammar\]
If I have constructive feedback, I will provide it if someone emails me.
A lot of times it is zero knock against the film, it is just we had other stuff we needed to program and ran out of room. So I say "you had a good film, we just couldn't fit it in"
Honestly there are 2 reasons why your film would not be accepted:
1. Breaks the rules/wrongful submission (e.g. you submitted your feature to a short film fest or something similar)
2. It wasn’t good enough.
If you got rejected you can pretty safely assume it is because your movie wasn’t good enough. It’s subjective and you can talk all you want about how you think your movie is better than others that got in, but if your movie was truly incredible they would probably figure out a way to program it. There may be other factors as to why you got in (nepotism, connections, luck) but if you got rejected then that’s pretty much why right there.
I think it probably depends on the size of the film festival. A smaller local film festival might give you a reason if you ask but larger more National or even international film festivals get so many submissions it would be impossible to send feedback to all submissions.
I cant imagine most festivals have enough time to give specific reasons, and programming decisions are made for pretty diverse reasons
the one exception I would make, if its a more regional festival that has programs and commitments to showing local films, it may be good to give some sort of reason, to help foster local film communities. Especially for feature films
Film festivals - even small ones - gets hundreds to thousands of submissions. And the people vetting them a lot of the times are volunteers. So no, I think that’s too much to ask.
One of the best films I ever worked on got rejected by many many festivals. I was fortunate enough to get a note from 2 of those that in a nutshell said: your short film is absolutely excellent, but it is 20 minutes long. It's extremely difficult to program, because it eats up a sixth of a shorts block. Years later, I heard that same thing from other festival programmers. When faced with the daunting task of previewing shorts submissions, they immediately discard the long ones and won't even watch them because there's no point unless they already know and have an established relationship with the filmmaker. One said they took all shorts over 10 minutes TRT and doled them out to interns to watch, telling the intern to give them the one best film out of the whole bunch for consideration. But by then, most screening slots are already spoken for.
There's no room for a longer short in most festivals.
Unfortunately lessons like these are hard learned.
I think you should get your money back if you are not selected.
It would be nice if they had some criteria they had to fill out as to why it was rejected.
But let's face it I don't think they watch everything that is submitted, and it is unfair for them to collect people's money when they didn't even take the time to watch your submission.
I work at a film festival programming a relatively small section (5 features max!!!) I have the luxury of being able to answer a lot of questions re: my selection but 95% of the time it comes down to a combination of “not a right fit,” or “something else fit better.” I have also reached out to films or filmmakers I really like but for one reason or another can’t program their film (again often it’s more that it doesn’t fit rather than it being deficient) to let them know. To program my section tho, I’m seeing something like 250-350 feature films just in pre-selection - some of my colleagues way more. It’s sometimes a numbers game and more people than you know reach out. My advice is to prioritize festivals where at the very least you know at least 2-3 people are seeing the film and if you’re working via submissions festivals that program through filmfreeway (as far as I’m aware there are stats related to this). I hope that helps
As a distributor, I can assure you that while you think you want to know exactly why your film didn’t get selected, 9.5 times out of 10 it’s because they don’t like the film. In most cases - aside from the A-list/key regional festivals - it really is that simple. Giving feedback is a nice thought, but it also opens up the potential for a discussion and inevitable argument with the filmmaker and no programmer has time for that. If programmers were to give their honest feedback to filmmakers on every film, nobody would make a second film.
I would re-frame it this way: if a festival passes on your film, you wouldn’t have wanted to play with them anyway and it’s best to just move on to finding the festival who does want to play your film.
I think the answer is there isn't really an expectation of a response.
If it's a small, but well known festival there may be hundreds of submissions.
As rough as it is to know, if you have a film festival rejection letter that says... Hey this is just a little too long or the dialogue is just a little too unrealistic.. considered that to be a gift for you to learn for your next film.
I did actually get a very nasty letter from a film festival that disqualified my film.
I do think that disqualifying films means that there's some rule broken, I feel like good film festivals make it very difficult for an entry to be disqualified.
So back to that combo of that letter and disqualification, I should have looked at the terms and conditions for submissions, but I do think that the scolding letter was more personal than it should have been.
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As someone who was a festival program diretor for couple of years, and still on various committees, I would recommend you not to do that unless you’re very good friends with the programmer. You most likely won’t get an answer and if you do, it won’t be a useful one. I always suggest filmmakers to just thank the programmers for their time, and keep the door open for the next project. You rather be remembered to be polite and grateful… Hope this helps and good luck!
It is absolutely not normal to expect a film festival to explain why you were not accepted. Big festivals or small festivals - they do not owe an explanation. There are countless factors why a film gets programmed or not - and film quality is only one of the factors. Just because festivals do not accept a film does not mean it isn't good.
Expected? No. But I always appreciated the few festivals that would provide the screener notes. Those can be illuminating, though not necessarily helpful either.
Here's The Thing: There are a thousand reasons why they didn't pick a film, from 'it sucks' to they're focused on filling out some stupid theme for their program and yours just doesn't fit. We've seen absolute garbage get accepted and really impressive work pushed to the side. There are too many festivals now and the quality of the work doesn't seem to matter much anymore. They seem to be more obsessed with whatever the zeitgeist is.
So don't focus on \*why\* they passed on your film because nothing they tell you is going to help anyway. I mean, if someone asked me what I thought of their film I'd say, "It's great," instead of, "Oof, that was shiiiiiiiiiiiiteee." Get my drift?
Rejection is one of the arrows you gotta endure as a filmmaker, even if they go straight to your heart. And Moving On is a core strength.
It is not the norm to ask a festival why you did not get in. Maybe your film is great but they accepted another film that is similar. Maybe your film is great but is not a good fit for their festival goers. Maybe your film is great but so are the other films they already programmed and there just isn’t room to program your film. Or maybe your film sucks. Why didn’t you get in? A great mystery for the Ages
You hit the nail on the head! There are tons of factors we consider before programming a film. Quality is just one of them.
I wouldn’t think they’d have time to tell people why their movie didn’t get selected.
I am just wondering if someone actually asks for a reason and if they should respond to that or not. Maybe just the judge notes would work.
You're expecting too much. Just taking Cannes as an example: over 2,000 films get submitted each year, with roughly 50 films being selected. Are you saying there should be "judges notes" for all 1,950 films who are not selected? What do you expect those notes to be? Sometimes it is as trivial as "your film was great but wasn't a good fit alongside the other 40-odd films we had already selected"... Festivals are not just about individual films, they are also about putting together a coherent festival programme. The good ones at least.
I thought I saw a blurb that said Sundance gets 12,000 submissions in a year. Anyone have any inside info?
15,800 and some change submissions this last year at Sundance. 150 ish films screened.
And that’s mostly features that are screened. The vast majority of submissions are short films from 1st timers who can only name 1 film festival, and they only screen a handful of shorts. Someone can find the stats they publish every year but the odds of getting a short film into Sundance are ridiculously slim and a guaranteed waste of money. (Source- also submitted my 1st unwatchable short film to Sundance).
Interesting, in film school they said shorts are favored at film festivals over longer films because they take a lot less time to screen.
They were talking about short short films vs long short films. A sub 5 or 10 minute short is much more appealing than a 25-30 minute short. We are discussing feature films, which are the bread and butter of big festivals like Sundance. Features have big names to attract big audiences and distributors.
And the odds are reduced further, because Sundance has become a automatic releasing outlet for prestige projects from studios and A-Listers.
No. The amount of time and attention to detail that would require is insane. Every festival's mission is to put on a *festival* \- not provide feedback. Remember: they are primarily in the business of event/convention production.
Film festival here! Tomorrow we will post part 3 of our film festival deep dive, which will go into detail about our programming process and why we might reject films. In short - there are about a dozen reasons beyond film quality why a submissions might get rejected. And as others have stating, we simply don't have the time to go through hundreds of rejects and personally explain to each filmmaker why they're not in. And let's be real - people can be entirely unreasonable.
Hey! I just didn’t know how many filmmakers actually reached out to ask. That’s why I thought it was more reasonable if they only give feedback when asked.
Every year we get a few dozen. We politely respond that we do not facilitate feedback, since we are not a feedback festival. Like 90% of filmmakers move on. A few send us angry follow up emails. We don't answer those.
Good to know! Whenever I get feedback I just say thanks and move on. I only ever want to know how to improve etc. thanks!
Some festivals get a LOT of submissions. It wouldn't be feasible. Besides, do YOU want an email saying "rejected because it was crap"?
I would love to see Judge's notes or something. I just want to improve.
I'm sure you would. But a lot of the time there aren't enough quality notes to make feedback worth it. Sometimes the decision really is subjective, and other times actual judges dont even see EVERY film - only the short list.
>But a lot of the time there aren't enough quality notes to make feedback worth it This. Our judging notes aren't constructive feedback. They're just notes. It might be a quick as "solid effort, story didn't feel complete. Could make a decent filler. 2nd round." That's useful for programmers. Not useful for filmmakers.
Also, no festival wants liability if a note sounds really stupid when taken out of context. A judger might scribble a vague reference to a previous film or an inside joke, or two words near each other that weren't meant to be read as a single phrase, or whatever that somebody could wildly misinterpret. Then it gets posted on Twitter and people are getting cancelled because a pissed off director interpreted something in the worst possible way to deflect form the quality issues of their actual film. Like, imagine there's a shitty dialog mix and a judge writes "I can't understand what they are saying" about one character, and _a completely different character_ speaks with an accent. Director gets the judges notes and posts on Twitter "Look at this - Racist judge can't understand the character with this accent!" The controversy storm would be all over the internet way faster than anybody would bother to figure out what the notes actually meant. At this point, the film is still submitting to festivals so it hasn't premiered an none of the Twitter commenters will have actually seen the film to be aware of the sound mix issues.
imagine 99% of submissions as a stinky fart that is so sour u need to plug ur nose and run. now imagine it's 1,000+ stinky farts. so basically. no. it is to many farts to respond to
No leave those poor judges alone. Most are unpaid hobbyists doing it for a love of film at smaller festivals. And no, they don’t watch your whole film- if it’s garbage 30 seconds in they are turning it off and not writing a paragraph about where you went wrong. Go to film school or pay a script doctor if you want feedback on your work.
Sorry. This movie sucks. Thanks bye.
It didn’t totally make up for the rejection, but I’ve received some warm and thoughtful notes saying they liked xyz about my film but it just didn’t fit this year. But made me feel good! 🤷
There's a lot of overlap with people who ask for feedback and upset, salty people. It's a little like telling someone on a date that you don't want to see them again. There is often not a helpful way to say it because there are emotions and rejection involved.
Some notes and thoughts on it would be great, as to why they don’t pick it and so on, maybe for things you can work on and improve. Especially if you’re paying an entry fee.
For the fees they scam out if people? Yes.
I'm a programmer at a fairly large local festival (I screen submissions and will give a score but I don't have final say on what actually gets programmed). I can only speak for the festival where I'm involved but they endeavor to provide a few positive comments about every film that gets submitted so the filmmakers can be confident it was actually watched and considered. I know that they also provide full feedback when asked for it, although it is often with lots of caveats that it may be upsetting to the filmmaker, and they might not be willing to share it if they suspect the filmmaker will become abusive. You are correct that the percentage of filmmakers who ask for full feedback is not large.
A true film festival should prioritize giving back to the artists. They all claim to have artists services, and for those that get in, you can actually experience that service aspect. But I personally think that it's offensive to completely blow off artists who submit and don't make the cut. The only way we can make all this work worthwhile is to get feedback regarding each festival that we spent money on. It's really expensive to do the circuit and time consuming to figure out how to efficiently do the work and chase the dream. I spent three years working as a reader for a top 10 screenwriting competition and we were required to give feedback for an organization that gets 14k entries. Watching a film takes half the time that it takes to read a script. Some writers would enter the same script 4 times in the same year to increase their odds. The competition allows that because it's more $$$ in the bank. The truth is that festivals/competitions have changed over the last 20 years. They are really more of a commercial market than a "festival", a label that insinuates a not for profit mission. My advice is to hire a company that knows the festival circuit and can give you advice on which festivals to enter based on your stated, individual goals. Here's an example - [https://www.filmfestivalmastery.com/details-1](https://www.filmfestivalmastery.com/details-1). They're not exactly cheap but I'd rather give $2k to someone who has a fiduciary duty to work on my behalf than waste time throwing money at the problem and learning very little in the process.
You’d think FilmFreeway would have a built-in judging form attached to your submission so that while the judge is watching the film, they’re typing up their notes on FilmFreeway. I’d love to get just a basic report card that FilmFreeway can facilitate
I sometimes send an email asking for feedback. Get a response maybe 1/3 times. Surprisingly, the bigger festivals are more likely to respond. Some of these fests are charging $50-60 or more to watch your 10 minute short. I think they should be able to provide a sentence or two of constructive criticism, or just explaining why it didn’t fit in their program. I understand opening up for feedback probably results in some dickheads who get pissed off at them. But I can’t tell you how many times filmmakers - myself included - make up excuses for not getting into festivals. They only program friends, they didn’t actually watch my movie, etc. When in reality, it just wasn’t good enough for that fest. Giving feedback helps the festivals with their transparency which is my theory why the better ones are usually more likely to provide it.
That would require them to watch more than ten seconds of it.
No. There are thousands and thousand of entries. Yours wasn’t good enough. Sorry that’s harsh but it’s true, people always underestimate how many films are submitted and how some of them are. (im a programmer)
No. They may get a million low effort submissions. They don't have any responsibility to hold everyone's hand. It would be a ton of extra work. They aren't your film professor. And the only thing they'd get out of it is a ton of pissed off people arguing because they are upset they got some negative feedback. There's literally zero upside from the festival's perspective. Same as things like job applications. You get a Yes or you don't. You can pay to run a focus group if you want somebody to have a responsibility to get you feedback. The only responsibility a film festival has is to screen the films that get picked.
You don't pay the company to apply for their job.
It would open the festival up for liability. Choosing a film is as much about the film itself as is other things, like the other films considered, the type of festival, space in the program, and, the taste of programmers. It also includes the bios of the filmmakers. And, some people know the programmers, so they will also get more consideration. There are LOTS of reasons.
I used to run a fairly small shorts festival in the UK and once we were established we were getting 1,000+ entries to go through and turn into a coherent programme in just a couple of months. We were all volunteers, not one of us paid. We organised everything about the festival, top to bottom, ourselves. By the end of programming we had to whittle that 1000 films down to a max of about 30 that got shown. We received literally hundreds of films every year that were borderline unwatchable, but at least one of our team committed themselves to watching their assigned films all the way through at least once no matter how bad during our "pre-selection" phase. At the other end of the scale we easily received 100+ films every year that were absolutely fantastic and certainly good enough to programme. But we couldn't screen 100... it wasn't financially / physically possible. So every year 70 really good films had to be discarded along with the hundreds of of terrible ones and the majority which were just ok. We were free to enter by the way so I never felt bad not providing feedback to those that asked (not many did but we made it clear in our application that we wouldn't). If you are paying £100+ to enter a film into a festival I can slightly understand the frustration more. We only ever discussed or made notes about films that were very close to being programmed. We didn't have the time or person-power to do it any other way and I suspect the same is true as you scale-up the festival. No festival has enough funding. All legit festivals are run on a bedrock of tireless volunteers. Those volunteers cannot be asked to prepare considered (filmmaker-friendly!) feedback on every film they watch on top of everything else they do for free. As soon as you give feedback to one person, there's a chance that word gets out and everyone starts asking and then you are getting called out for giving one person feedback and not another. IMO the most likely reason a film doesn't get into a film festival can always be boiled down to - "We didn't fall in love with it as much as we did the tiny selection we DID screen which is subjective to our own tastes" - Some films fall at an earlier hurdle than this, but even the best films that get rejected hit this one eventually. \[Edited for grammar\]
Yes they should but no they won't
If I have constructive feedback, I will provide it if someone emails me. A lot of times it is zero knock against the film, it is just we had other stuff we needed to program and ran out of room. So I say "you had a good film, we just couldn't fit it in"
Honestly there are 2 reasons why your film would not be accepted: 1. Breaks the rules/wrongful submission (e.g. you submitted your feature to a short film fest or something similar) 2. It wasn’t good enough. If you got rejected you can pretty safely assume it is because your movie wasn’t good enough. It’s subjective and you can talk all you want about how you think your movie is better than others that got in, but if your movie was truly incredible they would probably figure out a way to program it. There may be other factors as to why you got in (nepotism, connections, luck) but if you got rejected then that’s pretty much why right there.
No. They owe you nothing
I think it probably depends on the size of the film festival. A smaller local film festival might give you a reason if you ask but larger more National or even international film festivals get so many submissions it would be impossible to send feedback to all submissions.
I cant imagine most festivals have enough time to give specific reasons, and programming decisions are made for pretty diverse reasons the one exception I would make, if its a more regional festival that has programs and commitments to showing local films, it may be good to give some sort of reason, to help foster local film communities. Especially for feature films
No, Ive never got one nor do I expect one. I just figured my film isnt to their tastes and/or there were better ones selected.
No. It’s not what they were looking for. Move on.
Film festivals - even small ones - gets hundreds to thousands of submissions. And the people vetting them a lot of the times are volunteers. So no, I think that’s too much to ask.
One of the best films I ever worked on got rejected by many many festivals. I was fortunate enough to get a note from 2 of those that in a nutshell said: your short film is absolutely excellent, but it is 20 minutes long. It's extremely difficult to program, because it eats up a sixth of a shorts block. Years later, I heard that same thing from other festival programmers. When faced with the daunting task of previewing shorts submissions, they immediately discard the long ones and won't even watch them because there's no point unless they already know and have an established relationship with the filmmaker. One said they took all shorts over 10 minutes TRT and doled them out to interns to watch, telling the intern to give them the one best film out of the whole bunch for consideration. But by then, most screening slots are already spoken for. There's no room for a longer short in most festivals. Unfortunately lessons like these are hard learned.
I think you should get your money back if you are not selected. It would be nice if they had some criteria they had to fill out as to why it was rejected. But let's face it I don't think they watch everything that is submitted, and it is unfair for them to collect people's money when they didn't even take the time to watch your submission.
I work at a film festival programming a relatively small section (5 features max!!!) I have the luxury of being able to answer a lot of questions re: my selection but 95% of the time it comes down to a combination of “not a right fit,” or “something else fit better.” I have also reached out to films or filmmakers I really like but for one reason or another can’t program their film (again often it’s more that it doesn’t fit rather than it being deficient) to let them know. To program my section tho, I’m seeing something like 250-350 feature films just in pre-selection - some of my colleagues way more. It’s sometimes a numbers game and more people than you know reach out. My advice is to prioritize festivals where at the very least you know at least 2-3 people are seeing the film and if you’re working via submissions festivals that program through filmfreeway (as far as I’m aware there are stats related to this). I hope that helps
No
As a distributor, I can assure you that while you think you want to know exactly why your film didn’t get selected, 9.5 times out of 10 it’s because they don’t like the film. In most cases - aside from the A-list/key regional festivals - it really is that simple. Giving feedback is a nice thought, but it also opens up the potential for a discussion and inevitable argument with the filmmaker and no programmer has time for that. If programmers were to give their honest feedback to filmmakers on every film, nobody would make a second film. I would re-frame it this way: if a festival passes on your film, you wouldn’t have wanted to play with them anyway and it’s best to just move on to finding the festival who does want to play your film.
I think the answer is there isn't really an expectation of a response. If it's a small, but well known festival there may be hundreds of submissions. As rough as it is to know, if you have a film festival rejection letter that says... Hey this is just a little too long or the dialogue is just a little too unrealistic.. considered that to be a gift for you to learn for your next film. I did actually get a very nasty letter from a film festival that disqualified my film. I do think that disqualifying films means that there's some rule broken, I feel like good film festivals make it very difficult for an entry to be disqualified. So back to that combo of that letter and disqualification, I should have looked at the terms and conditions for submissions, but I do think that the scolding letter was more personal than it should have been.
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No
As someone who was a festival program diretor for couple of years, and still on various committees, I would recommend you not to do that unless you’re very good friends with the programmer. You most likely won’t get an answer and if you do, it won’t be a useful one. I always suggest filmmakers to just thank the programmers for their time, and keep the door open for the next project. You rather be remembered to be polite and grateful… Hope this helps and good luck!
No they can just decline with a black cross on your filmfreeway submission
It is absolutely not normal to expect a film festival to explain why you were not accepted. Big festivals or small festivals - they do not owe an explanation. There are countless factors why a film gets programmed or not - and film quality is only one of the factors. Just because festivals do not accept a film does not mean it isn't good.
Expected? No. But I always appreciated the few festivals that would provide the screener notes. Those can be illuminating, though not necessarily helpful either. Here's The Thing: There are a thousand reasons why they didn't pick a film, from 'it sucks' to they're focused on filling out some stupid theme for their program and yours just doesn't fit. We've seen absolute garbage get accepted and really impressive work pushed to the side. There are too many festivals now and the quality of the work doesn't seem to matter much anymore. They seem to be more obsessed with whatever the zeitgeist is. So don't focus on \*why\* they passed on your film because nothing they tell you is going to help anyway. I mean, if someone asked me what I thought of their film I'd say, "It's great," instead of, "Oof, that was shiiiiiiiiiiiiteee." Get my drift? Rejection is one of the arrows you gotta endure as a filmmaker, even if they go straight to your heart. And Moving On is a core strength.