Are film festival becoming a complete waste of time? [Slamdance 2011 = 1.35% chance]

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filmmakerguy

Member
When the odds to get into Slamdance are this competitive, seriously what is the point? 10/738 features get in = 1.35%. Harvard's acceptance rate for 2011 was 6.2%. You have a 400%+ better chance of getting into Harvard. The numbers for many of the other festivals are much worse. If you then factor in that each festival only allows a few features from specific categories, maybe 2 comedies, 2 other, 2 other, etc...then you are really playing against some impossible odds. :Drogar-KnockedOut(D


Slamdance 2011:

Narrative Feature Competition 10 spots available
Documentary Feature Competition 8 spots available
Narrative Short Competition 50 spots available
Documentary Short Competition 13 spots available
Special Screenings (not in Competition) 6 spots available

Submissions by Category:

Shorts - 2939
Narrative 
Features - 738

Documentary Features - 315
Documentary Shorts – 248

http://www.slamdance.com/2340894/Occupy-Sundance-or-How-I-learned-to-Stop-Worrying-and-Submit-to
 
There are other festivals than Slamdance. My film MARIANNE got into 13 festivals last year and at least one this year. Thanks to that it's gotten over 20 glowing reviews on sites like Ain't It Cool News, Twitchfilm, Fangoria, Badass Digest, FEARnet and a whole heap of others and got into (I think) five or six Top Ten 2011 film lists (including two on Twitch and an honorable mention on Nordling's list at Ain't It Cool). I wouldn't have gotten there if it hadn't been for festivals, and I certainly wouldn't have gotten wide distribution (which I now got at least domestically).

And this is all without me getting into Slamdance.
 
dont forget its actually lower, tons of the spots are promised ahead of time to friends, former fest winners, established film makers who they know or want to know, agents and producers hustling behind the scenes.

Probably 3/4 if not less of those spots are actually open for submissions.
 
just one of the reasons i started a fest of my own to run. no politics, no bs, just a way for people to showcase their films. going into the 3rd year this summer. first two years had great responses and appreciation from the filmmakers.

acceptance rate depending on length varies from 20-40%, but decreases with each year because of additional submissions. on top of that i try to give every filmmaker a clear notion of what gets accepted by spelling out for them every category a film is rated on and the details of what gets a good/bad score.

still though, some submissions come in and make me wonder....
 
David Jimerson said:
What's funny about that is the origin of Slamdance.
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Went to wikipedia to find the origins. Worst day to try that, apparently (Let's not get into the discussion as to why ... I like this thread being alive).

I'm assuming it was made for those who couldn't get into Sundance? Is this an accurate guess?
 
Hawk Teflon said:
Went to wikipedia to find the origins. Worst day to try that, apparently (Let's not get into the discussion as to why ... I like this thread being alive).

I'm assuming it was made for those who couldn't get into Sundance? Is this an accurate guess?
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Spot on. Slamdance was made as an outcry against the elitism of Sundance. The "About" page on the Slamdance website even opens with a pretty straightforward statement:

It all began when a group of cheerful, subversive filmmakers weren’t accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. Unwilling to take “no” for an answer, they instead started their own event - Slamdance: Anarchy in Utah.
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http://showcase.slamdance.com/#1488509/about
 
The sad thing is that all of these festivals are making a LOT more money than they used to ---- > why ? More submissions = more revenue.
Every one of them is reporting record number of entries.

I don't see the number of viewing slots increasing at any of them. Shame on you festivals.
 
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Sure your chances of getting into slamdance are slim, but they have a few rules that sets them apart from other festivals.

- If your film gets in, that's it....you don't have another film play slamdance (unless it's a very special circumstance)
- filmmakers that were in the festival from the year prior, do a round of judging.
 
Jester2138 said:
Your chances aren't slim if your film is good enough.
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tom-cruise-as-maverick-top-gun1.jpg

Yeeha, Jester's dead....right!

(+1)
 
I think that maybe a smart move would be to think about what kind of movie you are making, or have already made, and seeing which festivals it has a good chance of getting into and which ones it may not be suited for.

Example: one of my favorite ideas that I want to film in the coming years is a low budget horror/action flick that is sort of an homage to the great John Carpenter flicks from the 80's like The Thing, Escape From New York, and The Fog. It has a tough talking lesbian as the main character, who is traveling across the Midwest when an outbreak of an experimental mutagen gets loose and starts turning the populace into zombies and mutants.

Would I try and enter something like that in a major festival like Sundance, Slamdance, or Cannes? Hell no. I'd look for horror or sci-fi or other genre specific festival(s) to enter. But in the end, I'd be looking for a distributor or self releasing it, because it is a genre flick with an extra helping of genre heaped on top. I would just be wasting my money submitting to a big film festival, because no matter how good or profound a film about a tough talking lesbian hitchhiker killing zombies and mutants might end up being, they'd probably just scoff at it as schlock.

Andrew McCarrick said:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slamdance_Film_Festival

Mobile site still works.
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Thanks for the info Andrew. I am going through Wiki-withdrawal over here.

I feel like Johnny Five from Short Circuit. "Need more input..."
 
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Regarding the thing about only getting into Slamdance once, do you mean with features? Because I was in the fest in 2010 and there were short filmmakers (several in fact) that had multiple films in the fest over the years.
 
I don't think a film festival needs to be fair. You're competing against the entire world to make one of the best films of the year. A 1% acceptance rate just means you better be really good.
 
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