Film Festival Alliance has released a standardized guide of best practices for film festivals.

Aimed at streamlining the film festival application process for filmmakers and at helping festivals adhere to shared guidelines, the guide is meant to facilitate better relationships between the festivals and the filmmakers who apply to them.

The full list of best practices includes standard procedures for the film submission process, accessibility, selection methods, communication with filmmakers, and screening guidelines.

The best practices started as an idea from Film Festival Alliance co-founder Jon Gann.

“He has always really wanted this to happen for film festivals, for us to kind of standardize the way that they operate, and also provide more transparency so that filmmakers understand better what they’re getting into when they’re submitting — and also just challenging festivals to provide more information, to make it a more equitable space, and to kind of demystify the idea that all festivals are just taking money and watching your films and rejecting you,” FFA communications director Gray Rodriguez tells MovieMaker.

More About the Film Festival Alliance Best Practices

Courtesy of Film Festival Alliance – Credit: C/O

Leslie Raymond, executive director of Ann Arbor Film Festival and a board member at Film Festival Alliance, says the guidelines will answer key questions that filmmakers often have during the application process.

Also Read: How to Handle Rejection From a Film Festival

“What happens when your film is submitted? How many times does it get watched? How much of it gets watched? What is the process like? What kind of requirements are there, and might there be hidden fees? Like, if your film is selected, are we going to demand that you close caption it, and what kind of cost is associated with that?” she says.

“I’ve been directing Ann Arbor Film Festival for a number of years now, but prior to that, I was a teaching artist and so I used to submit to film festivals. There’s that sense of, ‘My film went into a black hole. I don’t even know what’s happening.’ And sometimes festivals don’t even bother to tell you that they’ve received it. Sometimes they don’t even bother to tell you whether it was accepted or not. So we just wanted to kind of raise the level so that our professionalism in our industry could be a little bit more robust.”

Raymond adds: “We are taking money from filmmakers, and so, you know, I think on an ethical level, we want to make sure that they understand what they’re getting.”

The best practices list goes hand in hand with Film Festival Alliance’s other new feature — the Film Festival Alliance Directory.

Now, filmmakers looking for reputable, trustworthy festivals to submit their films to can refer to the directory in order to ensure that the money they spend on submission fees is being well-spent. The directory is a list of all of the film festivals that have committed to participating in the best practices guidelines and are members of the FFA.

Gray hopes that the directory and best practices guide will be tools that help filmmakers who have completed films “figure out that next step before you go to submission platforms, really do the research and figure out what festival is a good fit for you before you spend that money.”

The FFA has over 230 festivals, consultants, and programmers in its membership across the U.S., Canada, and the UK. Supported in part by the American Rescue Plan Act grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the organization puts on professional development workshops year-round to foster a community of festival professionals.

Main Image: A photo from the BlackStar Film Festival, courtesy of Film Festival Alliance