In presenting only films by male filmmakers, the writers said, the festival “show(s) once again that men love depth in women, but only in their cleavage.” Festival Director Thierry Fremaux responded by saying he agrees women lack opportunities to make films; however, he said, the problem exists year-round, not just during the ten days of the festival. Cannes could not, he said, start choosing films based strictly on the gender of the filmmaker. Undoubtedly this will not be the last word on the issue.

Undoubtedly.

Anthony Kaufman, writing for Indiewire:

in emails Withoutabox threatened participating Indee.tv festivals to “deactivate all third party submission services in order to avoid disruption to your Withoutabox service.” And 10 festivals dropped the new service.

Reddy calls Withoutabox’s exclusivity claims “ridiculous.” “The tech industry would NEVER stand for this,” he said, in an email. “Imagine Hotmail threatening to block access to your emails if you tried Gmail. The tech world will chew them to bits. Amazon knows this, but somehow feel like they can get away with bullying small festivals outside the tech world. They have a lousy product and rather than work on building a better one they stoop to these exclusivity clauses.”

There are some interesting quotes from festival directors here about the problems they have with Withoutabox (WAB), the automated submissions system for filmmakers sending their films to film festivals. 

As DC Shorts director Jon Gann points out in the article, this situation is unlikely to change until someone steps up to “challenge the goliaths.” In this case, I think that means that a handful of prominent festivals (with typical annual submissions numbers upwards of 2000) would have to commit to using a different system. This will be accompanied by a blow to the number of submissions they receive, but introducing competition to the world of festival submissions might be worth it to them in the long run. The hard part of WAB’s business to copy is its access to a large number of filmmakers with films ready to submit to fests. But if the only way to submit to some of the larger festivals were through an alternative solution, even that database of filmmaker prospects could be replicated over time.

(As an aside, I suspect that number of “400,000″ filmmakers is mostly bogus. There may be 400,000 registered emails in the WAB system, but the chances that all – or even most – of those people are still actively submitting films to festivals is, in my humble estimation, pretty unlikely. It would have been nice to hear from a filmmaker or two in this article, since they are the people ultimately paying the bills.)

I think it’s important to say here that, other than those emails enforcing the exclusivity clause, Withoutabox (WAB) isn’t behaving in a particularly evil way.  The people who work there are generally terrific and the service is the backbone of the film judging process. Unfortunately, WAB is a cog in the great Amazon/IMDb machine. Amazon is perfectly content to let that cog continue spinning as it has always spun, feeding other parts of Amazon’s business. And without competition to threaten the way that cog spins, there is very little incentive to devote development resources to improving WAB’s software, service, or pricing.

Regardless, festival staffers will likely continue their love/hate relationship with Withoutabox for some years to come. Here’s one of my favorite rants from the festival perspective: the criminally under-watched “Bitch Fest” from Project Twenty1.

This tongue-in-cheek flow chart is one of the cleverer ways I’ve seen of communicating a film programming ethos. There are plenty of “joke” dead-ends here (I especially like the hackneyed-but-still-funny thrashing of the Comic Sans typeface), but also a serious path through to festival acceptance that reveals the qualities in a film that these programmers want. 

The creators of the Lower East Side Film Festival (often shortened, somewhat misleadingly, as LESFilmFest) seem to have done a great job in their inaugural year of creating an identity for their festival. I also see some interesting experiments going on here (like the “QuickSubmit” tool that allows filmmakers with private screening videos on YouTube or Vimeo to bypass the usual submissions process).

I’m looking forward to seeing what they do in 2013.

More from filmmakers Mark Potts & Brand Rackley on how not to do well on the film festival circuit. See also Film Festicles episodes 1 and 2.

Potts’ newest feature Cinema Six (co-starring Rackley), just premiered at the Dallas IFF.

From their press release:

“The Milwaukee Film Festival is continuing its dedication to being filmmaker-friendly by offering free entry to all films this year,” says Artistic and Executive Director Jonathan Jackson. “We want filmmakers to save their money for filmmaking. They should put that $100 into their next film.”

New from Film Threat: an entertaining series of videos about the film festival process, written and directed by my friends Mark Potts & Don Swaynos. Above: episode 1, in which a filmmaker wraps his shoot and gets a little bit ahead of himself.

Potts’ newest feature Cinema Six will debut in April at the Dallas International Film Festival.

That’s the title of the panel I’ll be sitting in on at South By Southwest this year. If you’re in Austin for the festival on Tuesday, come by and learn what I and my esteemed colleagues (listed here) have to say about the state of short film and distribution.

Here’s the official SXSW page for the panel.

A few other panels I’m looking forward to in the film conference include:

Tough Love: Why You’re Still Not Festival Ready

Iron Sky: Forging the Future of Film

The Evolution of the Douchebag in Modern Cinema

Hollywood Lessons: What I Learned the Hard Way

Chris & Jesse revive the podcast after almost 2 years. In this episode: the expedited death of 35mm exhibition, the protracted death of the Withoutabox message boards, and how to time your submissions to festivals.

• Austin’s Paramount Theater
• Roger Ebert on the Sudden Death of FIlm
• Online Petition for 35mm
• Withoutabox

Got questions? We’ll answer ‘em! Send email to chris@filmfestivalsecrets.com or reply to @ffsecrets on Twitter.

Download the MP3 now or subscribe in iTunes.

Photo credit: D Sharon Pruitt

Eric Snider, writing for Film.com:

You see, these lesser-known film festivals are the hidden gems of the movie world. I’m not going to claim that the overall roster of movies at Oxford is as good as the lineup at a typical Sundance, but the difference between them isn’t as great as you might think, either. If you’re a film buff who can’t afford to travel to the top festivals, you would do well to check out whatever is happening in your own backyard.

The Oxford, Mississippi film fest has been one of my personal favorites for a few years now. The festival’s focus on bringing great independent films to an underserved audience – regardless of the pedigree of those films – never waivers.