You Got Into the Film Festival, Now What?
How to promote your movie at a film festival
Before I got into any film festival I went to a Docs in Progress workshop that talked about what to do once you’ve gotten into a film festival. I wish I had taken that workshop to heart, I think overall, we would have had some more success at film festivals. Getting into a film festival can be a crapshoot, but having a successful screening at a film festival is a lot of work!
If you clicked through from social media and haven’t done it, why don’t you click this button and make it official:
In the last post, I wrote about the pros and cons of film festivals. I’m pro film festivals, but they have to be the right film festival for you and you have to promote yourself once you get In. We did a whole festival run before I learned what we needed to do and we learned it all from our last festival, Slamdance.
Going to Park City for a film festival that happens at the same time as Sundance is an exhilarating experience. It’s also a ton of work. We had to compete for audiences with all of the Sundance movies. Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes video I put together. I shot it YouTube vlog-style:
As you can see, it’s an experience I wouldn’t give up, but it was a ton of work.
Don’t Rely on the Festival for Marketing
Just because you got in, doesn’t mean people will just show up to watch your movie, you need to be out there promoting. Some of our screenings were full, some were not so full, but there were a lot of people at both of our Slamdance screenings because we learned we need to be out promoting it.
Film festivals will do a little bit of promotion for you. They’ll add your synopsis and logline to the program. You may end up in their promo video. They could share your trailer a few times. It’s not much, but it’s also not their job to promote you you need to be promoting your movie yourself.
I’ve seen plenty of screenings where two or three people showed up, and it’s utterly devastating for the filmmakers.
Prep Your Pitch
You should know it like the back of your hand at this point. You’ve pitched your documentary to your subjects, you’ve pitched it to raise money and you may have pitched it to distributors, but it’s not over yet. You need to be prepared to pitch people to come to your screening.
Get out and talk to people (once we get back to in-person festivals). Festivals are social events. You should be going to the parties, mixers and other screeners and telling people about your film. If there’s a line, talk to the people in front of you, talk to the people behind you. Give them the elevator pitch for your doc, get them excited so they’ll come and watch.
In Park City, during Sundance, everyone rides the city buses, so it’s the perfect opportunity to pitch the people around you for a screening. We also got 10 comp. tickets, if we thought there was a good chance for a couple or group to come to a screening, we gave them one of our comp tickets (thank you Gene Deems for that idea).
Poster Wars!
At Slamdance they have what’s called the “Poster Wars.” There are locations set up where we were allowed to put up our posters to promote our movies, and they are valued real estate. We had to bring a lot of cheap copies, because every time we would put them up, about an hour later, HBO or Showtime’s street team would come through and plaster over our posters. Most film festivals aren’t like that, but you should ask if there are places where you can put up posters. Buy cheap copies and put them up anywhere you can (as long as you won’t get into trouble). Put them up in local businesses, on boards and ask if there are places at the parties where you can hang them.
Swag
Make or buy some free stuff to give away. We had palm cards, we put stickers on the palm cards with our screenings. We also had “Get Lucky with Muffy” condoms that we bought from Say it with a Condom (in the doc, Muffy uses condoms with that saying on it as campaign material) and Muffy brought her own guitar picks that said “dick” so she could hand out “dick picks.” It was a little excessive, you don’t need that much, but all of the swag we brought made good conversation starters that we could use to break the ice before we pitched our screening. We attached the condoms to the palm cards so people would have a reason to take them. It got people talking.
Social Media
This may seem obvious but document everything on social media. We need film festivals for publicity, but if you’re not publicizing it on your social media, then you’re not using all of the tools available to build your audience. The film festival will probably retweet or repost it, gaining an even broader audience.
What I’m watching
I’m about to make my students watch one of my all-time favorite documentaries “Minding the Gap.” It’s on Hulu. It’s framed around skateboarding, but it’s all about breaking the cycle of domestic violence.