How to Get Your Film Selected at UIFF

Recently, I sat down with Rebekah Louisa Smith, the Film Festival Doctor, to pull back the curtain on how we actually program our festival. You can listen to the entire interview with Rebekah HERE. With over 1,500 submissions coming in internationally this year, our screeners and programmers have to be incredibly strategic about what makes the final cut.

If you’re a filmmaker looking to navigate the festival circuit and get your work on the big screen, here is exactly what we are looking for when we open your submission.

The Ultimate Dealbreaker: Your Sound Mix

Filmmakers love to get excited about their high-end cameras or the amazing actors they cast. But let me tell you a secret: nobody complains about those things. If we get a complaint from our audience, it is always about the sound.

If your sound is excellent and beyond reproach, your film is already escalating in my programming brain. We have a beautiful theater with a beautiful sound system, and we want to make it pop. If a film comes in with a dodgy room tone or a wonky mix, it is dead in the water. Our screeners are under strict orders: if the sound is terrible, it doesn’t even make it to the second stage of evaluation.

Don’t Be an “Emotional Vampire”

We watch hundreds of hours of films. This past year, we received tons of movies about death, dying, and heavy trauma. Watching them back-to-back acts like an emotional vampire—it sucks the energy right out of you.

We can’t do that to our audience; that’s not what they spend money to come see. If you want to stand out, bring us a fresh voice. Try taking a heavy topic and flipping it on its head to make it funny or quirky. Or, as Neil Gaiman suggests, take a classic story like Little Red Riding Hood and make the wolf the protagonist. We are always hunting for a unique take that doesn’t feel like a regurgitation of the same 1970s horror tropes or edgy film-school dialogue.

The Holy Trinity: Poster, Trailer, Synopsis

When we open your FilmFreeway page, we review your materials in a very specific order:

• The Poster First: If your poster is just a boring landscape shot with your movie title slapped on it, you’re not giving us a good first impression. Give us a tagline, a credit block, and a visual that tells us what I’m about to watch.

• The Trailer: Keep it under 60 seconds. Teasers are fantastic because we rely on vertical reels and Instagram stories to promote your film.

• The Synopsis: Two to three sentences, tops. If you need a whole page to explain your movie, you don’t know what it’s about. Pro tip: have an impartial friend watch your film and tell you what it’s about, then make that your synopsis. If your synopsis doesn’t match the movie I just watched, it’s a huge problem.

The Feature Film Reality Check

We absolutely love short films—they are our bread and butter. We do program feature films, but we need filmmakers to understand that getting a feature into a festival is significantly harder than getting a short in.

A feature takes up an entire programming block. To justify that, we have to ask:

• Will this draw a large enough audience?

• Is the filmmaker invested in pushing tickets?

• Will the filmmaker actually attend the Q&A?

• Does the film fit the overall tone of everything else we’re doing this year?

If you are submitting a feature from the other side of the world, have no budget to attend, and have no marketing plan, the odds are against you. Do your research on a festival’s core audience before you spend your submission money.

Be a Collaborator

Cover letters are a big deal for us, but please stop using them as a resume! We are not looking to hire you.

We once had a filmmaker submit a movie that we were honestly on the fence about. But his cover letter blew our mind. He wrote, “Here is how I am going to get butts in seats at your festival. Here is how I am going to collaborate with you to promote this screening.” He outlined the reels he’d send, the collaborative posts he’d do, and his marketing strategy. It made us readjust in our seats and look at his film with fresh eyes. Because he solved our biggest pain point—ticket sales—he pushed his film into the “yes” column.

If you care about your movie, prove it. Don’t be a ghost online. Create a social media presence, tag your cast and crew in your announcements (so festival PR guys like me can find them and tag them too), and upload clean, vertical reels and behind-the-scenes photos to your press kit. The easier you make it for my publicity team, the easier it is for me to program your film.

So that’s the secret sauce. If you are looking to make your film the most attractive one in the season, follow these tips and we will see you in January!