Stephen Follows (Blog) contacted 5,000 film festival directors, asking them to fill in a quick anonymous survey about their experiences. 523 festival directors completed the survey. Following is the third of three articles Stephen wrote about the results.
In the last installment of my Film Festival Survey, I offer the thoughts of film festival directors from around the world. My previous posts looked at how many festivals there are and the economics of running a festival. They were largely presented as charts and graphs of statistics.
In total, 523 film festival directors shared their thoughts, providing 14,862 words of commentary. Below is a selection of their thoughts.
The key messages are:
- Film festival directors are just like filmmakers
- A great story is the most important factor in picking films
- Cinematography is the next biggest factor, along with good sound
- Every festival wants your film to be shorter
- The smaller festivals are crying out for better films
- Festivals expect the filmmakers to market their own screenings
- Press kits and fancy packaging won’t help your chances of being selected
- Better subtitling and sound will
- Festival Directors really don’t like Withoutabox
Read the rest at Stephen Follow’s blog –>
Related articles
- Top Five Reasons to Be an Early Bird on Film Festival Submissions (prweb.com)
- Film Festivals Pt 1: The Truths Behind Film Festivals (StephenFollows.com)
- Film Festivals Pt 2: The Economics of Film Festivals (StephenFollows.com)
- US6829612: Withoutabox’s Dirty Secret (StephenFollows.com)
INDIE FLURRY 
5 thoughts on “What Festival Directors Really Think”