Re: festival responses

From: bryan mckay (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jun 03 2009 - 06:52:54 PDT


Caryn,

My festival does send out acceptance and rejection emails to each one
of our filmmakers, but there are rare instances where things fall
through the cracks and an address is left off our list or our message
ends up shuffled into their spam folder. We do our best to notify
everyone, though we do occasionally here from the angry filmmaker who
wasn't told of his or her rejection.

Of course, I would love if we could make the process even more
transparent. I would love if we could give rejected films some of the
comments and notes we make in screening committee to give them an idea
of why we rejected their film, but given that we received over 700
submissions last year alone, it would be a time-consuming effort to
say the least.

Best,
Bryan

On Jun 3, 2009, at 8:01 AM, Caryn Cline wrote:

> 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>.
>
>

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