Festival Attendance

M

Monkey Chaos

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A silly question here:
Do you have to be present for the showing of the film at the festival? Is it frowned upon if you aren't? What's to stop one person to submit his one "good" film to every festival he finds and doesn't go.. just sees if he wins? What if the winner is not present?
Ok, done with my silly question.
 
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Sometimes a fest is too far away from you to attend, and you might possibly have previous engagements. You don't have to attend, but like Will said, there is a huge upside to being present.

Poke
 
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I don't know about the USA, but Canada has a program for travel granst, to pay for filmmakers travel expenses if they get into festivals... If it's a money issue, look into travel grants.
If you just don't want to go- you'll be missing out- it's exciting, and you can make connections!
 
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That's what the Chinese say too. Come down- dine cheap.
Did you guys know that they actually made a bunch of concrete moose and scattered them around Toronto- only to sell them a year later because they couldn't keep up with grafitti artists? Now you can find statues of Moose all over the place, completely random, and scattered with different art that they covered up the graffiti with?
It's wierd- corporations just bought the moose, and now they're so random.
If we make some money off our premier of our movie, I'm going to buy a moose and take him to all the festivals! :D
 
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i think it can backfire (promoting it in person). that new Matthew McConahageye (?!? - fella from Contact and er..) film, Sahara - apparently he has been going around touring it, even passing out buckets for people to donate into. Supposedly this has had a terrible effect on the chances for revenue. If you do go, make sure that you are ready to converse with strangers, are charismatic, enigmatic and appear highly talented, without knowing it too much.
 
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As a festival director, here are my thoughts on the subject...

I, personally, don't frown upon non-attendance by the filmmaker(s), especially if they're not local. However, filmmaker participation is key to a great screening. If you are local and you can't attend yourself, send someone associated with the film to represent. Not only are you supporting your community, you're supporting the festival (which costs a small fortune to put on...) and, plus, you never know who will be in the audience that can further the theatrical distribution of your project.
 
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You know, I'm really glad you asked this question. I've applied to over a dozen festivals, and the local ones I will of course attend, but several of them are out of state: St. Louis, Savannagh, Telluride, Austin, etc. It'll cost me an extra couple thousand at least to attend all these festivals.

Anyone know if there are any student travel grants in USA, Los Angeles specifically?

I bet anything the maker of "Ryan" in Canada used those grants to attend all the festivals he got into in the US and parlayed that into an Oscar win. I saw him at AFI. Crazy canucks.

Donlee

P.S. The best Chinese food is in Guang Dong, China the home of dim sum served 24/7.

I would know, I'm a Chinese Jew.
 
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