Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

BY NICK MARSHALL, GILBERT, AZ, USA - So you’ve got an idea. A good one. You’ve turned it into a film. Now you’re wondering how to get your film onto the film festival circuit. Well, instead of scrounging the internet for hours, clicking on billions of links that lead you astray, spend a minute reading this and afford yourself more time for those other good film ideas.

First, go get Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide. Today I frequented my local Borders to skim through this book (I had been hearing it was the be-all, end-all source for film festival information) and I planned on leafing through it casually and then going on my way to finish the rest of my errands for the day. It started off fine, glancing through casually, reading sections of interviews and “Top 10” lists. But oddly enough, I soon found myself seated in a comfy chair, enjoying the interviews with directors talking about their impressions and mistakes on different festivals and then found myself taking out my pocket notepad and jotting down notes. I really intended this to be a five minute escapade and twenty minutes later I got up and really did leave. Gore’s top 10 lists cover mistakes filmmakers make and what to do at film festivals, even how to effectively crash a party at a film festival. Morgan Spurlock (SUPERSIZE ME) talks about how he prepared for Sundance and Jared Hess (NAPOLEON DYNAMITE) also describes his experience with Sundance. The end of the book is filled with detailed info about all the major film festivals in North America. Gore also throws in cheap marketing tips for your film.

If books aren’t your thing, click over to WithoutA Box.com. Sign up for free and get information about all the upcoming film festivals. As a filmmaker, you can search by submission date, genre, location and dozens of other parameters. Without a Box makes it much easier to find the perfect festival for your film.

If you pay a cheap yearly fee, Without a Box will summit your film and press package to as many festivals as you want and you only have to fill out one entry form instead of hundreds. Watch the Demo to see what other services they provide. These two resources make getting on the film festival circuit much less exhausting. You can even see which festivals are going on and buy tickets to those festivals. The site is amazingly easy to navigate and useful.