I imagine that you are now starting to prepare your film’s festival distribution, you have recently locked picture, and you are looking for the first festivals to be able to submit it.
You have started an Excel spreadsheet with the main festival details: the deadline, name, website, dates, fees, etc.
This spreadsheet will become your own festival database, which will grow as you move forward with distribution, adding new entries.
But, before you know it, you are going to have a problem, because you have focused on listing festivals, but they do not exist; sections do.
Let’s look at two examples
In the case of the Berlin Festival, the Berlinale is it a world-premiere festival? is it for shorts or features? fiction or documentary? It depends, because if we look only at this entry as it is: Berlin Festival, we cannot answer any of these questions.
Depending on each of its sections, it will have a different typology, in terms of duration and genre; even the contact person or the submission fee changes. Therefore, in your festival table you will need to create entries for each of these variables, based on your film’s requirements.
In the case of major festivals with many sections, these can look like small festivals within a large festival.
The Official Selection is not the same as Panorama or Forum, and for shorts they do not have the same requirements: Berlinale Short is not the same as the shorts selected in Generation, or the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section, dedicated to German short films. They are all different; they even have independent programming lines.
At Seminci, for example, something similar happens: there are sections for feature films, documentaries and short films. Can we say that Seminci is a documentary festival? Not exactly, although many Spanish documentaries premiere here, since it also includes fiction. Therefore, to be more accurate with this statement, we must say that Seminci has a documentary film section with its own name, Tiempo de Historia, and reflect it that way in our database.
Continuing with Seminci, is it a festival that qualifies for the Goya Awards? If we make a generic table, we will have to mark yes, but that is not true. The section that qualifies for the Goyas is the Official Short Film Section, but not La noche del corto español. Therefore, Seminci, as a film festival, cannot exist in your database; you must reflect its different sections, each with its own requirements.
The case of the Oscar-qualifying festivals
Now look at the festivals that qualify for the Oscars: if you have downloaded the lists I have available on the blog, you will have noticed that they are separated: fiction, animation and documentary. It is not a generic table, since they are based on the qualifying sections, not on the festivals themselves.
No one would doubt that the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival is an Oscar-qualifying festival. However, if I am distributing a documentary, I would be wrong, since it does not qualify for documentary—only for fiction and animation. Although in this case there are no different sections for documentary; everyone competes in the same competitive section.
So what do we do? If we build a database based only on festival entries, I will always have errors. The solution, therefore, is to create two different entries: one for documentaries and another for fiction and animation.
But be careful: for the Goyas it does qualify in documentary. Things get complicated.
It also gets complicated in cases like RiverRun, which qualifies for the Oscars, but only in animation and documentary, not in fiction.
The problem with platforms and festival databases
To build your own database, you will be looking for different online lists and databases as sources of information, as well as the lists from submission platforms. In many cases you will run into this problem: many of them are built around festivals, not sections, so they are of very limited use.
Some of these databases do not take into account the different variables for each section, such as duration or genre, and they only provide a generic festival contact. For this reason, you will have to review each festival independently, digging through the sections until you find the one that fits your film.
The main mistake is that most of them have been built considering festivals as single events with their own requirements, but those requirements are found in the sections, and there may be several within the same festival.
Sections at film festivals
Sections are fundamental to film festivals, as they allow audiences to be segmented and offer broader, more flexible programming.
Sections also allow festivals to innovate and grow, as is happening with the new virtual reality sections that have been created in recent years. Some festivals have so many sections that we could say that festivals have become true umbrella brands for their sections. This is the case with Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, Cannes, and many more.
The term umbrella brand is used in marketing to define those brands that bring together other brands and products. This strategy helps reduce costs and risks when launching new products on the market. Applied to festivals, this strategy allows, for example, Tribeca to create a new competition for short films made with Snapchat within its programme and benefit from the international prestige of the Tribeca brand.
I hope you keep these tips in mind, especially if you are just starting to get your film moving now and creating your own database.
It is important to build it properly from the start, because once you have many entries, making changes and adjustments is more complicated. Thinking in terms of sections allows you to design a more precise festival strategy.
See you in the comments! Or via my contact page.