Documentary magazine editor Tom White pointed me to a great article by filmmaker Paul Devlin over at The Independent. Devlin has a new film, BLAST!, that he launched at this year’s HotDocs. He shares his experiences navigating the festival experience with valuable insight:

Festival programmers want virgins. So choose wisely where your film is going to lose its virginity, especially if you want to maximize press and sales potential. After the premiere, your film may have trouble being accepted into competition at the next festival, or even being accepted at all. Read the whole article>>

Of course, that is only one piece of advice that I chose because it’s dramatic. Paul offers many more pieces of good advice.

There are a couple of points where I can see the festival side of things. He notes that festival entry fees add up and calls it a “major revenue stream” for festivals. That might be true in some cases, but not most. $30 from 1000 films is $30,000. While that is a nice chunk of money, from that they have to pay a staff person to coordinate those submissions (track & label DVDs as they come in, distribute to screeners, etc.), pay their Withoutabox subscription fees, event staffing, travel to scout films, and create printed materials such as programs and quick guides at the fest. I’m a firm believer that a festival shouldn’t lose money and the better organizers will make that income go far, but dealing with 1000 submissions is no small task even if there are only slots for 90 films (when I worked with Silverdocs in 2005, there were 1200 submissions for about 80 slots–features AND shorts–in case you didn’t know how hard a programmer’s job is).

He digs into fests on the issue of premieres and I agree with Paul from the filmmaker perspective, noting that this is largely a press/industry issue, not an audience issue. But, for filmmakers hoping to create business relationships at a festival, that is at the heart of it. There is a rather small group of industry executives and they travel to a lot of festivals in search of films and filmmakers. If they see a program filled with work they have already seen at Sundance, then why attend SXSW or Tribeca? The festivals that aspire to be places where you can meet buyers have to put on a program that won’t be stale to the executives they are trying to attract. It’s a double-edged sword for the filmmaker. That is where thinking through the strategy becomes critical.