Tuesday Musings - On Niche Festivals, an Opinion

The world of Film Festivals has been expanding exponentially over the past few years. Film Freeway is a great resource for filmmakers and festivals alike, where festivals can list and filmmakers can submit projects, all in one place. Since I first joined Film Freeway in 2016, the number of listed festivals has grown to 8,117 as of this writing! Now not all of these are brand new festivals; some well-established festivals just hadn't listed there before, but the vast majority are new, which begs the question: is the world of Film Festivals reaching critical mass? I say not yet for some very specific reasons, and here comes an opinion piece. One is that there is a vast array of different types of festivals, from very small and exclusive to big, well-known ones, catering to many types of projects and budgets. Enter the Niche Festival. This type of festival caters to a very specific type of film, based on its goal and audience. Some are wider genre or technique types, like horror, web series or animation festivals, but some are even more specific, hoping to change the festival experience for under-represented (and often overlooked) groups of people. LGBTQ festivals have blossomed over the past few years, as have Women's festivals, but you can get even more specific, like the excellent Women Over 50 Film Festival, offering a venue for a truly under-represented group of filmmakers. Many niche festivals seek to balance out the sometimes severely skewed percentages of both entries and acceptances at festivals due to aspects like race, culture, sex, age or sexual orientation. Are group-specific festivals a good idea? I enter both niche and general festivals. I know that some of my projects (both due to genre and subject matter) just wouldn't play well in larger general festivals (my little animated comedy about menopause comes to mind 😀 ) as they are made for a particular audience, so I'm grateful to have venues for those. On the other hand the larger, more general festivals can establish your place in the festival world at large, especially for less specific projects. So it's a bit of a balancing act, but I'm happy that both types of festival are out there!

Now just a quick word opinion about a growing problem: rather sketchy and ephemeral "festivals" out for a money grab. These first came to my attention a few months ago. They had very low entry fees and were almost exclusively online. Now neither of these characteristics means it's a bad or dishonest festival - there are some good, well-established festivals out there with these criteria. What made these stand out was that there were a bunch that appeared at the same time, gave themselves names that seemed to come from a festival name-generator (if there ever was such a thing), had the exact same wording in their descriptions and all came from the same part of the world. They hung around for a couple of months then just as quickly dropped off the face of the planet. I will reluctantly admit that I jumped on the bandwagon of a couple of them at first; then started to realize what was going on. So, beware!...but don't be afraid to enter festivals, just be thorough and cautious. I've learned to be. 😑

UPDATES!

"And She Rode Forth..." screened at the Jersey Shore Film Festival in Deal, NJ this past week and won an award for Best International Short Short!!! Very honoured and excited about this!

"Espressivo, a Love Song to Coffee" has been chosen to screen at the Laff-Vin Laughter Film Festival at the Red Skelton Performing Arts Center in Vincennes, Indiana in August! I had two films show there last year as well; it's a good fit for my style of humour.