Sundance Rejection Letter

what do you do with films that get rejected to festivals? submit them to other festivals? I mean, 9800 submissions? why even bother? I think someone on here made that point before.

"Sure the game is rigged but don't let that stop you! If you don't bet you CAN'T win!" - Lazarus Long
 
This made me feel good knowing the films we submit actually get watched.

I think for the vast majority that would be "partly watched" only.

How could they ever watch that many films between submission and selection.
I'm guessing they do what we all do when watching something on the internet, if it isn't very impressive in the opening couple of minutes it gets the flick.

Personally I have no idea just my hunch, but unless they had a very large selection committee the math just wouldn't work.
 
According to the trades, there were ~3800 films submitted. Where did you get the 9800 number from?

Michael
 
9800 is the number of total submissions (feature-length, shorts and docs).

3800 is the number of feature-length submissions. here is a tweet from John Cooper, festival director.

"3724 features submitted and we can only invite 113. So many tough choices. For me, a very good news-bad news day."
 
At least your letter was a lot nicer than my college rejection letter.

A friend here in KC submitted, the category he submitted too had 1068 submissions.

"This year, in the U.S. narrative feature film category, they were 1068 submissions. They accepted 16 films." is what he said.
 
9800 is the number of total submissions (feature-length, shorts and docs).

3800 is the number of feature-length submissions. here is a tweet from John Cooper, festival director.

"3724 features submitted and we can only invite 113. So many tough choices. For me, a very good news-bad news day."
Which means 6K shorts for about less than 100 slots ... :shocked:
 
We're like turkeys at Thanksgiving.

turkey.jpg
 
One of the films we submitted was in serious consideration apparently. we received this email from the head of programming a few days ago and our official rejection last night. It went to my partner at Sabi, Kevin Shah.

Kevin,

I have the unfortunate task of letting you know that we will not be able to include White Knuckles at the Sundance Film Festival this year. You will be receiving the official notification soon but I wanted to personally let you know in advance since I truly admired your film and sincerely thank you for allowing us to consider it for our program. This is always a difficult time because we see so many strong films but have so few slots to fill. I wish you all the success for the future of White Knuckles, and do hope you will come back to us with any future projects.

Best,
Trevor Groth
Director of Programming
Sundance Film Festival

Nice note from Trevor. He seems like a pretty good guy (met him several times at CineVegas) so you might get some play from folks he knows at other festivals. If CineVegas was still happening, I bet y'all would be invited for consideration based on your run with the Sundance committee.

-M
 
just out of curiosity, does anybody know the last successful movie that came out of sundance?

Uh, Precious

It's tough because they cut the number of selections this year as well.

The sumissions keep rising and this year the available slots got smaller.

-M
 
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