Another film festival
by HML
I just found out about a last-chance deadline for the LA Femme Film Festival, which is scheduled for October 5-8 in Beverly Hills, California. Most film festivals don’t include a screenplay competition, but LA Femme does; moreover, they accept adaptations and their submissions include a family-friendly category.
As per their web site, LA Femme “focuses on women filmmakers’ platforming their commercial films for the world wide audience. It is a Festival for those women who want to have an equal opportunity in commercial entertainment desiring to change, enhance, or become leaders in the industry as a Director, Writer, Producer or Director of Photography.”
Considering that NR is an adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, with a young woman lead, several supporting roles for women, and adapted by a woman (last I checked) this festival may be a good fit. Also, a nice thing about last-chance deadlines is they don’t leave much time for worrying; selections will be made the first week of September.
Sure would be nice to have a matched pair of those cute little “Official Selection of the Festival” laurel wreaths. 
August 9th, 2006 18:00
Do these festivals have mutual exclusivity clauses? Can you submit the same work willy-nilly to every festival you can lay hands on?
August 9th, 2006 20:08
Most of the festivals don’t have mutual exclusivity clauses. Sundance requires films to be either world or US premieres, depending on the submission category, so it has to be first, but not necessarily the only one. But almost all the screenplays I’m competing against at Gloria have already made the rounds (and won awards) at several other film festivals already.
However, almost all these festivals have a submission fee. Most of the fees are minimal ($30-$60 is the basic range), but they would add up over time.
Another limiting factor is the types of entries accepted. In my case, very few film festivals offer a screenplay competition, and fewer still allow adapted screenplays. This is usually for copyright reasons, although some screenplay competitions indicate they are only interested in “new, original ideas.” I’ve seen several film festivals that might be a good fit for NR if it were a completed movie, but they don’t accept screenplays. (Chillin’ at the Egyptian as part of SiFF — how great would that be? Followed up by an Austen Goes Wild night at the Queen Mary tea room, of course!)
The next factor is the type of film festival. I have a Withoutabox account for on-line film festival submissions and other filmmaking goodies, and they send me a weekly list of film festival deadlines. NR is unlikely to be a successful submission at the following festivals in this week’s email:
* Terror Film Festival
* Eerie Horror Film Festival
* Renderyard Animation Film Festival
* Sport Movies and TV India Ficts Festival
* Darryl’s Hard Liquor and P0rn Comedy Film Festival
You get the idea.
Other festivals aren’t as readily struck from my list, but Withoutabox provides a quickie profile of each festival’s mission statement and other information, and I do a quick Google search on ones that catch my interest.
So … yeah, I could send NR off to a dozen festivals every week if I wanted to, but I’m being cautious/frugal and only sending it to the ones where I think it stands a good chance of (1) exposure to professionals who might be interested in getting it made; and (2) winning a prize. The prize is just a resume-building, ego thing; if I met a producer who wanted to make the film, I’d consider the festival a success.
Originally I was going to finish up Gloria and decide what to do next based on those results, but when Withoutabox profiled LA Femme last week, I looked it over and decided it was worth submitting.