Eugene Hernandez’ article The Future of Festivals? poses some interesting questions on the future of the film festival circuit and their changing role in gaining film distribution.
“Film festivals themselves [will] become part of a distribution strategy for a film,” new Sundance Film Festival director John Cooper told Hernandez. “That’s what’s coming. It’s right around the corner.”
Film festivals have always been acknowledged as a stepping stone in getting distribution, but they can also be seen as a unique and valuable source of audience demographic information and a great place to network with others in the industry and build your fan base.
To foster that spirit, IndieFlix created Indie-fest, hopin
g to bridge the gap between the actual film festival and online audiences. Basically, IndieFlix strikes a bargain with the festival: they give us their top short films that they didn’t have time to show. Then, we show them for free through an Indie-fest web site powered by IndieFlix. Audiences can then log in, watch the films in their entirety and vote for their favorites. Winners can receive a a slot at the actual festival and a non-exclusive distribution deal with IndieFlix.
After we tally the votes, film festival directors and participating filmmakers get demographic information on the users who voted, which can be a great asset to any marketing strategy.
Film festivals are critical tools in the indie film world and we want to find better ways to utilize their resources (and ours) to give audiences and filmmakers what they want while broadening the independent film community, filling in the gaps between movies and their audiences.
Do you have any tips or suggestions on ways we can improve our Indie-fests?
Tags: Film Festival, Indie-Fest, social networking
Just want to chime in here. I’m a huge fan of the potential of how film festivals can expand the linkage that they already perform between filmmakers and audiences. I think the expansion of festivals into distribution entities is a great thing and will help independent film in many ways. I spent a chapter of Think Outside the Box Office talking about different approached to this issue – and IndieWire just put out that chapter for free on Friday. Here’s the link:
http://jonreiss.com/blog/2009/12/05/another-free-sample-chapter-from-think-outside-the-box-office-on-indiewire-the-new-role-of-film-festivals/
This post also explains a twitter/blog experiment I am doing to create a dialogue on this topic.
Each week I will be posting questions on a specific topic of film distribution and marketing to the filmmaking community via my twitter account @Jon_Reiss.
These questions and statements are intended to provoke discussion on these issues within our community.
I will try to answer as many questions as I can in the 140 character limit. However I know from past experience this will be very difficult.
So each week on Thursday or Friday I will write a blog post addressing the most pertinent questions and concerns raised by that weeks Twitter discussions on @Jon_Reiss.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Jon Reiss
reiss.jon@gmail.com
jon@jonreiss.com
lovely!!!! maybe is a sponsor in a different city wanted to host an indie-fest. than we could do the indie-fest on a big screen….
Jon,
Maybe your next book should be about promoting a film like you promote your book.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.