Why I Stopped Submitting to Small Film Festivals (And What Works Better)

On who pays for the festival, and why the film is the last thing it's about.

There is a transaction at the center of the practice of entering a film in a festival that no one says out loud, so I will say it.

I finance the film. I pay to submit my film for consideration. And if the film is accepted, it will be shown to an audience who paid to see it, in a hall it raised money to fill, under a banner it built its reputation on. Not all festivals are the same. I am talking here about the plethora of events that have proliferated in the last 25 years out of thin air.

That festival is a buyer that pays nothing and a seller that often charges the filmmaker to become its inventory. I've been on both ends of this arrangement for over four decades, and for at least twenty-five years, I have suspected something was inverted. Without the filmmakers, festivals have nothing to show, and when that happens, they become merely screenings. Filmmakers are not guests; they are the supply line. And a supply line that pays for the privilege of supplying is not a guest at all. I have been a patron without the title and without the tax deduction.

The Piccirilli Factor is finding an audience in universities

Now, follow the money, because it does not move the way the brochures suggest, and the longer you trace it, the stranger it becomes.

Consider the model that governs much of the world outside the United States. A nation funds the presence of its filmmakers abroad — through a ministry of culture, a national film institute, a film commission, or an association built to carry the country's cinema onto foreign screens. Not every country has such a body, but where one exists, the mechanism is roughly the same. The state pays the airfare. The state pays the stipend. The state delivers the filmmaker, gift-wrapped, to a festival that rolls a red carpet at a very low cost. I've been there.

And where does the state find the money? Well, in Argentina, for instance, it comes from a tax on the box office — a box office that is mostly Hollywood. So an American studio film, screened in Buenos Aires, is taxed, and a share of that tax is discretionally spent to fly a local filmmaker to San Sebastián. The festival in Spain is then indirectly financed by Hollywood — or, more uncomfortably, by the domestic distributors and exhibitors in Argentina who are ultimately paying to underwrite local film prestige. The same architecture repeats, with local variations, in Brazil, in India, and in much of the world that funds a cultural presence abroad.

The Soviet republics sent films and filmmakers to the European markets not to sell cinema but to advertise

This did not begin as cultural policy. It began as statecraft. The Soviet republics sent films and filmmakers to the European markets not to sell cinema but to advertise the tourism office, the achievements of the republic, and the line of the season. The film was the vehicle; the message was the cargo. I saw the machine at close range. Through the 1980s, I attended MIFED in Milan many times, and the market floor was a meeting-ground for every apparatus at once — Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Turkey — heads of film commissions who had come, essentially, to advance an agenda, and for whom the market was simply the perfect frame in which to do it. Nor was this an Eastern habit alone. The same logic, in a subtler key, ran through the American presence — the State Department has long understood that its cinema travels with cargo too. The degrees varied, from the naked to the genteel; the structure did not. What we call cultural funding today evolved from this, secularized and democratized, but intact. The state funds the filmmaker's presence because that presence advertises something — a nation, an industry, a brand, an idea. The filmmaker believes he is being supported. He is being deployed. The cargo has changed across the decades. The box has not.

The United States runs no such domestic machine. Whatever cargo its cinema carries abroad, at home there is no national film institute, no box-office tax redistributed to culture, no state purse that taxes the blockbuster and funnels it back to the maker. So the American festival cannot launder its economics through a ministry. It funds itself — and it funds itself in a way that is, if anything, more naked.

A focus group screening of "Daniel Chester French" at a cultural heritage site

The Cuban Exile in motion to cheer for "Calzada"

It is not poor. This is the part the festival would rather you not examine. The American festival is underwritten from several directions at once: the university that hosts it, the city, the state, private philanthropy, and, in some cases, the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts. The money is there. The budget is real. And then, on top of all of it, the festival charges the local filmmaker a fee to be considered — in his own city, his own state — while it flies in a Hollywood name, first class, suite included, because the name draws the crowd.

The fee is not a survival mechanism. A local festival might program three percent local independent work, often less; the fee is often under a hundred dollars. Against a budget funded from five directions, it is not a drop in the bucket — it is not even the drop. It contributes nothing to the festival needs. So, why charge it at all? Not for the money. The fee is too small to be about money. The fee is a posture. It establishes, before a single frame is screened, what the filmmaker is: an applicant. He submits. He pays. He waits to be judged. The transaction installs the hierarchy — the festival is the authority, the maker is the supplicant — and that submission, not the ninety dollars, is what the festival actually collects. The fee reduces the maker to a passive role before the conversation has even begun.

A memory worth treasuring. Rio International Film festival

And the funding that does arrive — the grants, the public money, the philanthropy raised in the name of art and community? It does not reach the community filmmaker. Understandably, one might say, he hardly moves the needle. He does not fill the seats or draw the press or justify next year's report to the grant committee. So the money goes to the show — the cocktails, the fireworks, the rented theatre, the first-class ticket for the name. The films are not the event. The films are the occasion for the event. The curated showcase exists to justify the reception, not the reverse.

The money raised to bring cinema to the public is spent on the proof that the public came.

This is where the chamber reveals itself. The screen has become a resonance box — a chamber built to amplify something, into which a film is fed because a film is what the chamber happens to require. At the festival proper, what is amplified is a cause: walk through the programs and the window onto the world has been partitioned into constituencies, a strand for this identity, a sidebar for that nation. I do not say the causes are unworthy. I say it is often not about the films anymore. The film has become the pretext.

Retrospectives as another way to organize memories

And it is not only a political festival. Consider the American university (most universities host a film festival), where so much of this country's serious film culture was supposed to live. The campus festival descended from the cine club — an instrument of cultural democratization, built to bring beauty and difficult cinema to people who would not otherwise meet it. Many have become something else: a mini-Telluride for the elite to have a taste of it (not all). The amplification there is not a political cause but a class signal — we are the kind of people who watch this kind of cinema. The machine does not care which message it carries. Identity, nation, ideology, refinement — feed it a film, and it will amplify whatever it was built to amplify. I will keep attending these when invited, and I will keep saying, because it is true, that they help agendas more than they help the filmmakers down the street.

Now I will argue against myself, because the honest essay must.

This year I carried four films into the market at Cannes, through an agent in whom — for the first time in a long while — I feel genuinely represented. And the market worked. No one charged me to amplify their message. No one asked me to stand under a banner with my thumbs up. I wasn't even there. The film represented my work, and the transaction ran in the only direction that respects the maker: toward me.

Cannes holds both animals under one roof. Upstairs, the red carpet performs its causes and crowns its stars. Downstairs, the Marché does business. The market survives because it never pretended the film was anything but an asset. Over time, the festival became more powerful by binding itself ever closer to Hollywood, and this year it handed John Travolta an honorary Palme d'Or — its lifetime laurel, the same one it gave Tom Cruise — to launch a streaming title that had been sold before the festival ever selected it. The highest honor in world cinema, presented as a tribute to a career and a favor to a studio. That is not a festival that lost its way. That is a festival that found it.

I told myself, for a long time, that the festival once sold cinema. I am no longer certain it ever did. I am only certain which floor my work belongs on, and it is not the one with the carpet.

So here is the whole of it, and it is smaller and harder than a prophecy.

I am not announcing a death. I am resigning from a post. I no longer need the festival for the things it once monopolized. For access, there is now the open channel — anyone can publish, the gate is gone. For commerce, there is the market and the agent, where I am the seller and not the inventory. What remained was authority — the laurel, the certificate, the proof that the work had been vetted. And authority is precisely what the festival surrendered. Not only the day it began certifying constituencies instead of cinema, but the day the laurel became something a festival prints for you the moment it cashes your entry fee — a badge generated by an app, dispensed by the dozen. Stack enough of them on a poster, and you have proven nothing except that you paid. The laurel has become a token of peer acknowledgment, traded among filmmakers, no longer backed by any real authority — the festival's private currency, minted for the price of an entry fee and worth precisely what the next poster agrees to pretend. When every film wears a crown, the crown certifies nothing. It certifies nothing I need.

The festivals are not dead. To say so would be nihilism — God is dead, and all that follows. Most will outlive me. What I am reserving for myself is something smaller and saner: the right to choose. It is not for the festival to decide which of my films to show. It is for me and my collaborators to decide which festivals are worth showing them to, and why.

I am not calling for a revolution. I am calling for a return to sanity and to confidence. A local festival without you and me is merely an echo chamber of Hollywood at the domestic level. We are the difference. We are no longer here to sustain their sales pitch.

If a festival is interested in my work — and it should be, my films are fabulous — let it call me, take me to lunch, and make the case. Let it persuade me that its audience is worth my effort. That is the direction the courtship is supposed to run: from the one who needs the film toward the one who made it. I am old enough to remember when it did.

On circulation, the slow life of a film, and the institutions that host the maker rather than billing him.

First, the high — because we should be honest about what we are giving up.

The provincial festival, the gender- or niche-focused festival (Women, African American, Latino LGTBQ), offers a quick fix at a very low price. An invitation arrives by email; we fall for the cheap flattery and pay a nominal fee, occasionally after applying a discount code that everyone else seems to have as well. You get accepted, nominated, and the first set of laurels lifts you. A screening follows, and it lifts you again. If you are lucky, an award, a diploma, and yet another laurel — printed in seconds by an app, dispensed by the dozen — and you stack it on the poster beside the others. It feels good. It is engineered to feel good. That is what a high is for. And then the hype dies, and the film often dies with it.

It does not have to be that way. There are alternatives to the quick fix, and the best of them, stripped of all that provincial excitement, is the part nobody photographs: the slow life of a film after the applause has stopped. The word for it is circulation, the least glamorous word in this essay — which is precisely why I trust it.

Here is the road. Approach a cultural center, a civic center, a museum, the historical society, the school, the university — outside the festival, on the festival's blind side. These places carry a standing obligation the festival does not: they have to organize events throughout the year around themes that may profit from the subject of your film. The city hall, the community center, the historical society — they need to create these events to keep building community, and they do so almost silently, season after season. They have the need. You have the goods.

So the courtship runs in the only direction that respects the maker: from the one who needs the film toward the one who made it. When this happens, the inversion I described is complete. At the festival, you are the inventory. At the institution, you are the guest, and they host you.

I mean host in the full sense. After the work begins to circulate — that word again — there is compensation. Not a windfall; I will not pretend it is. It is something better than a windfall. It is a dignity. There is a screening fee, often $500 to $700. There is a fee for the director's presence, somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500. There is transportation, a per diem, a room for the night. I have been paid this way by the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum, by the UNAM in Mexico City and the University of Salamanca, by the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and by Yale, to name a few. These are places where the director, meets people worth meeting. And now and then, in a conversation that was never on the program — after the lights come up, over a late dinner — the next film is born. That is not a two-hour slot you paid for the privilege of filling.

A word about hierarchy, since the question always comes up.

The closest thing to a top tier is the so-called Big Five — Cannes, Venice, the Berlinale, Toronto, and Sundance — though for those of us making documentaries the ladder leans differently, and the names that matter most are IDFA in Amsterdam (the most important documentary-only festival in the world and where I always felt at home), Hot Docs, CPH:DOX, Sheffield DocFest, Visions du Réel, DOC NYC, and True/False.

There is also a formal aristocracy: the FIAPF, the producers' federation, anoints a handful of "A-list" competitive festivals — Cannes, Venice, Berlin, San Sebastián (nowadays too polical as much of the rest of the cultural institutions in Spain), Karlovy Vary (glorious in the late seventies, not as much today), Locarno, Tokyo, Mar del Plata (home sweet home), Cairo, Shanghai, Tallinn Black Nights — but the label is bureaucratic, and an A beside a festival's name guarantees neither cultural weight nor the right room for a given film.

In practice each one is currency in a different economy: Sundance for North American independents and streaming acquisitions, Cannes for the pure symbolic prestige of the auteur, Venice increasingly for Oscar campaigns, Toronto for the bridge between audience and industry. Which is the long way of saying that the festival map is not a single ranking but several at once, and the only useful question is which economy you are actually trying to enter — for the kind of work I do, auteur documentary anchored in history and culture, that has meant IDFA, Venice, the Berlinale, Locarno, Sheffield, CPH:DOX, and the more museum-minded festivals far more than the commercial circuits.

Now I will argue against myself, because the honest essay must.

There is one festival I will always support: the festival of the place you actually live.

If you are local, then the festival stops being a laurel machine and becomes the only honest thing it can be: contact with your own. Not the certificate. The room. The neighbors, the colleagues, the people on your street, who will watch the work and then talk to you about it at the market on Saturday. In my case, that festival is the Virginia Film Festival, hosted by the University of Virginia, where I have premiered films before a full house and to the kind of attention only a hometown gives. A festival that treats the work, and not merely the laurel that decorates it, as the thing that matters is a festival worth defending. I have shown my films there many times and intend to keep doing so — glad to pay to submit, glad to donate, for the pure pleasure of supporting the community that has supported me.

Premiere of my film on Rita Dove at the Virginia Film Festival

Premiere of Monroe Hill at the Virginia Film Festival

When you are home, the festival earns you. Everywhere else, it bills you. That is the whole of the distinction.

There is one more thing the brochures will never tell you, and it is the best argument of all.

The institutional screening is not the end of the road. It is the on-ramp. The university screening becomes the library license; the license becomes the syllabus; the syllabus becomes the citation; the citation becomes a place in the permanent collection. Libraries do not forget the way a Saturday-night audience forgets by Monday morning. A festival is fireworks. This is a root system.

And the longevity benefits everyone with a stake in the work. The press release that goes out when the Recoleta programs the film is real news, not manufactured noise — it tells your investors, your patrons, and, yes, your daughter that the work is still moving, still found, still alive years after it was finished. That is the sustainable thing. That is what the festival, for all its carpet, was never built to give.

The festival gave me a spike. The road gives me a pulse.

So I am not the supplicant anymore, and I am not the inventory. I am the guest. Let the institution that wants the film write to me, make its case, and persuade me that its audience is worth the trip. It usually can. And when it does, the film does not die when the lights come up.

It goes home with someone, and it keeps going.

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