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Best film festivals to sell your feature film

Best film festivals to sell your feature film
Best film festivals to sell your feature film Now that I have one shooting day left before I wrap my feature film, I’m already thinking about how I will sell my movie.

There are several strategies  an independent filmmaker can utilize to sell their movie:

1) The independent route – Hire a sales agent and sell the film at AFM, Cannes, MIFED

2) Online – via DVD and video on demand direct sales from bitTorrent.com, Createspace.com, Netflix.

However, the method of selling a feature film I’d like to focus on throughout this article is…the festival route.

Festival Route

a) enter your film in festivals

b) hire a publicist to promote you (the filmmaker) and your movie

c) get discovered and secure a deal.

Pretty simple, right?

Well, let’s slow it down a little and discuss which film festivals are the best ones to submit your film to in order to maximize your chances of generating a deal. The person or people who purchase movies at festivals and write cheques to filmmaker are called acquisition executives.

Acquisition executives work for and represent film distributors who are looking to buy very good, entertaining films that have potential to earn profits. Here are the best film festivals to sell your feature film.

Why are these the best?

Because these are the festivals that the vast majority of acquisition executives attend.

The Elite 8

1. Toronto International Film Festival

2. Sundance Film Festival

3. AFI Fest

4. Tribeca Film Festival

5. Cannes

6. Berlin International Film Festival

7. Los Angeles Film Festival

8. South By Southwest

These are second tier festivals but still important

9. Palm Springs International Film Festival

10. Austin Film Festival

11. Hamptons International Film Festival

12. Santa Barbara International Film Festival

13. Cinevegas


This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 at 7:11 pm and is filed under UNCATEGORIZED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 written by Kyle Arpke April 18th, 2010 at 23:59

    I’m a little shocked to see Cannes at #5, but then again they tend to screen “artistic” films rather than mainstream movies, and the mainstream movies they do screen (like this year’s “Robin Hood”) already have distribution.

    I wasn’t expecting to see Berlin in their either. This is a good list to have. Thanks for posting.

    RE Q

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