Film Festivals & Movie Distribution

Video Transcript

"KEVIN LINDENMUTH: This is Kevin Lindenmuth for Expert Village talking about distribution for your independent film or documentary. Film festivals are a way to go. For some things, I think film festivals worked a lot better years ago, but they don't work so good now 'cause there's so many film festivals and a lot of them just seem ways, I won't name any film festivals, but they seen ways for the film festival to make money off the filmmakers 'cause there's so many filmmakers, so many films being made. They have like an entry fee, 50 or 100 bucks or whatever, and they're making a lot of money, now, hundreds or thousands of people send in their film with their $50 or $100. So, it is business for the film festival, the companies who were doing the festivals. If you get accepted on festival or if it gets shown, that's a way for the publicity that kinda works for the publicity and the hype. And if you win any award, it's always good to say "Oh I won so-and-so award". And that's, again, for the distributor, he has all the newspaper articles or internet reviews or whatever, it's as sure as the same purpose. Just because you're accepted, and let's say, you win for a second or third prize at a film festival, it doesn't mean you're going to get a distributor. It doesn't mean that distributors going to pay more money or whatever. It's just depends. If you're a film festival type of person, you're like going to festivals. You're like competing that way, do it. It's always good to enter a couple of festivals, if it's not your thing, just don't do it anymore for future films. But my route usually is, since I know where the program's going to go, what my intention is, it's kind of a waste of time for me to send it to a film festival because I rather just get it in the video stores. I'd rather just get on PBS and wait the six months or whatever before I could send it out there because usually there's stipulation with the film festivals is you can't have your film distributed. You can't hand it out to distributors yet. It has to be kinda like an untouched product. So, that'll add time. If you have time, you're in no rush you do the film festivals if you definitely want to get the thing out there, get it sold. You're probably going to have to forego that route."