We were honored that Withoutabox, one of the premier websites for submitting your independent film to film festivals around the world, just sent out the following to over 100,000 filmmakers about BIFF!
We caught up with Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF) to see what advice they have to give to filmmakers. Check out what they had to say to help make your submission stand out.
If you could give a filmmaker one piece of advice for their submission, what would it be?
Make sure your film is the right length for the scope of the story and don’t put anything in your film that doesn’t move the story forward.
What is BIFF looking for when reviewing submissions?
Our selection committee of directors, writers, and critics views each individual film with an open and receptive mind, searching for surprising, interesting and original films of all genres.
Are you anticipating any themes for this year’s submission season?
We don’t choose a theme for the Festival, but the chorus of voices represented in films at BIFF sometimes reflects what’s happening in society and the world. We’ve had political themes and music themes form organically in the past, but most often it’s a wide variety of great story-telling. BIFF shorts programs are very popular, proving how much audiences love a diversity of topics!
Is less more when submitting a film? Or more information the better?
We only make our selections based on the quality of the film. If there’s something interesting like a local connection, that can be included in the cover letter.
Each festival has a unique community of indie fans, what is the personality of BIFF’s audience?
At the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder, Colorado is a magnet for the music & film-loving outdoors-person who also likes to party. We are proud to show off Boulder’s huge, enthusiastic, film-savvy audiences to visiting filmmakers, many of whom may not accustomed to walking out on stage after their film is shown to face nine hundred cheering, foot-stomping film fans.
“They laughed at every obscure inside-industry joke and literary reference that I put in there,” said BIFF filmmaker Curtis Hannam, “jokes that had gone over the head of every other audience. And at the Czech film before mine, they were laughing before the jokes hit the screen in English subtitles. This is the greatest audience I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s because they have an open bar right in the middle of the theater.”
UPCOMING DEADLINE
September 14, 2015 – Late Deadline
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