festival responses

From: Caryn Cline (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jun 03 2009 - 05:01:58 PDT


Dear Frameworkers,

I’m submitting my experimental films to festivals again, after a hiatus of
several years. When I submitted before, in the early 2000s, I always
received a response from the festival, whether my work was accepted or
rejected. Now, I find that festivals that reject my work rarely contact me
at all.

I wonder why this is the case? I’ve paid a fee to enter, usually, and it
seems to me that the very least the programmers, or their interns, can do is
to send me a form letter letting me know that my work didn’t make the cut.
It would be even better to receive a thoughtful response with some feedback
about my work. I realize that programmers often have a lot of entries to
view and judge, but shouldn’t a response, even a canned response, to each
and every filmmaker, be a standard of professional courtesy?

I know that there are curators and programmers on this list. I will
appreciate hearing their perspectives, as well as those of other
filmmakers. I would also be interested to hear about festivals that do
respond to all applicants.

Thank you,

Caryn Cline
New York City

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.