As a quarterly screening series with no festival “deadline,” we find ourselves in an unusual situation when it comes to submissions. We are able to work through our submission queue and select films that may not play for up to 5-6 months. As a shoestring operation with very few staff, we have also found ourselves getting backlogged and not being able to respond to all submissions in a timely way. We’ve decided to do something about it.
When we first opened up our series to submissions, we set the fees at a very low US$10. The objective was to attract good submissions, while weeding out anyone who wasn’t at least a little bit serious. That worked well at first, but we’ve found that as our reputation grows, we’re getting more submissions than we can handle. So we’re doing two things to address the issue:
- We’ve decided to raise our basic submission fee for the first time since 2012. Effective immediately, regular submissions will be US$15.
- We’ve decided to introduce a new category of submissions. FastLane submissions will cost US$25, but will go into a separate queue and will be viewed by our programming committee first. We guarantee a decision on your film within 60 days or else we’ll give you a fee waiver for your next submission.
We hope this new system enables us to manage our submission queues more efficiently. A big thank you to all the filmmakers who have made our job so difficult by submitting so many films! Click below to submit your work to us!
