This past week the graduate students from the University of Central Arkansas' film program held a screening of their thesis films at Reynolds Performance Hall. I'm familiar with this program; I received my MFA from UCA many years ago. The program's pretty much the same as it was then; three years of studying things from cinema history, all levels of production and film theory.
On top of that, students are given roughly a year and a half to write, shoot and screen a 20ish minute short film as their thesis. But what happens to these short films after their screenings at the end of the semester? Do they just vanish into the ether of YouTube's bandwidth? Not necessarily. They move on to the incredibly predatory world of film festivals.
After a short film is completed, once the music is mixed in, the images color graded, the visual effects finalized and everything is exported as a digital file, the last leg of its journey before it becomes a line on the filmmaker's IMDb page begins. I'm talking about the film festivals circuit.
The average Joe can probably name a handful of festivals; Cannes, Sundance, South by Southwest, and maybe even Berlin and Venice. But the odds that a film makes it into any of those is, well, slim to none. But outside the big name fests, there are thousands upon thousands of competitive film festivals hosted around the world that short films can make their way through, depending on whether the filmmakers have enough money to keep their films afloat.
Submitting to festivals can cost anywhere between $10 and $50 a pop. It can be quite a pricey process. When my graduate film, "The Town Where Nobody Lives," was ready for its festival run, I spent well over $1,000 entering it into competitions, most of which rejected it.
For most Arkansas-made shorts, the process begins at the state level. Local festivals offer heavily discounted prices for local films. Arkansas Shorts, Made In Arkansas, and Filmland are all festivals that local filmmakers aim to screen at, and they're important festivals to help grow and solidify our community of actors, directors and cinematographers as networking at these festivals is one of the key components of any festival.
Once a short is done with the local market, then comes the more complicated process of figuring out which festivals outside the state to submit to. It's incredibly complex to figure out which festivals are worth the entry fee. The easiest path to take is to find genre festivals that match your film. My thesis film was a horror-ish movie, essentially it was an episode of "The Twilight Zone." There are hundreds of horror film fests across the globe, and I got to screen at quite a few cool ones and was even lucky enough to win some awards. I even went outside the horror genre and submitted it to the Humphrey Bogart Film Festival, which was strictly for films noir. It got accepted and I got to spend a weekend in Key Largo, Fla., hobnobbing with Bogie's son.
With all the enjoyable moments I experienced traveling with my film, there were also a lot of downsides to the grueling festival circuit. Most thesis films from UCA have a hard time getting into festivals in the first place. This is mainly due to running times. Festivals generally don't like programming movies that are over 15 minutes in length. The main reasons for this is because it's harder to fit them into schedules, and frankly it's harder to sell audiences on long short films. They can easily stay home and watch an episode of a TV show or an actual feature-length film.
Another issue I had in my festival run is the fact there's a lot of disingenuous fests out there; scams and grifts. I was even a victim of a scam festival. FilmFreeway, the premier website that filmmakers use to submit films, has done a great job in recent years weeding out fraudulent competitions. But there are still plenty of what I like to call bargain bin or flea market festivals. These events usually end up accepting most if not all films that are submitted to them. Which means that they screen up to 100 films over the course of a weekend, usually in very nontraditional venues like libraries or gyms or even people's living rooms.
These festivals are usually easy to spot because they tend to give out dozens of awards. I've seen award categories like Best Actor in a Sci-Fi Film, Best Fight Scene, Best Comedy-Romantic. It's like watching Oprah giving out cars, "You get an award, and you get an award."
The goal of which is to keep getting filmmakers to submit every year to earn an endless supply of yearly revenue from submission fees. Flea market festivals aren't really helpful to filmmakers, as attendance to them is fairly low. So no one watches your film in these subpar venues. But they are good for building up your self-esteem if you need a pointless award to validate yourself as a filmmaker.
Speaking of meaningless validation, filmmakers should also be wary of entering online film festivals. These festivals just take your film and host it on their website, with no guaranteed traffic. The main function of these fests is basically that they are selling filmmakers the all-prestigious laurel, you know, the little olive branch-looking thing on film posters saying "Official Selection of such and such Film Festival."
I have been guilty in the past of buying laurels. This practice can be detrimental for these short films. First, once your film is streaming online, that usually disqualifies it for a lot of other legitimate festivals who won't program movies that audiences can just watch online. Second, if your movie poster is covered, wall to wall, with these types of laurels, then that's a sign of desperation and legitimate festivals will more than likely stay away from booking your film, unless the quality of the filmmaking is outstanding.
There are all sorts of other small concerns and red flags that come with these types of film festivals, ranging from nepotism and lack of effort to transparency. Filmmakers don't usually make any profit on their shorts, and it's not worth the time, effort or one's integrity to fall for these predatory practices. Filmmakers need to be vigilant and do their research before submitting their shorts. Don't do like I did and just go down the list and click submit on almost every festival. All the laurels in the world cannot replace the ecstatic feeling of getting your film accepted to a legitimate festival and seeing your short in a crowded theater full of cinephiles.