Choosing the right festival
Large or small, niche or mainstream, which film festival provides the best venue to premiere your film?
Last March, the team behind the Crave original series Empathie boldly ventured from Montreal to Lille, France, for the French-Canadian show’s world premiere at Séries Mania.
As the first Canadian series to compete at the festival, and with significant differences between how French is spoken in Canada and France, the premiere came with some risk. A warm reception was not assured, the way it may have been at home, at Europe’s largest showcase dedicated to television. About 85,500 spectators attend the event over the course of eight days.
Impressively, Empathie won the Séries Mania Audience Award, as voted by festival attendees. Annie Sirois, Empathie’s executive producer and co-president at Montreal-based production company Trio Orange, says the audience connected with the story and that, as she’d hoped, actor Thomas Ngijol, who is from France, helped establish a personal tie at the festival.
“You can have the most amazing project, but to make it known to people is hard work. Now people know what it is,” she says, adding that marketing and publicity alone would not have made the show a success with the festival’s audience.
“It’s an incredible feeling to have connected with the public, and it brought us a lot of attention,” she says of the Audience Award. “Plus, it gives international buyers a guarantee that the public will love it.”
For Sirois and Trio Orange, premiering a Québécois project more than 5,000 kilometres from Canada proved to be a smart strategy. The festival offered visibility and international recognition, which created an organic pathway to high-profile media coverage — such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter — and then to buyer discussions. The team was rewarded for looking beyond expected venues and audiences.
The advantages of niche festivals
For Canadian filmmakers and producers, a little nuance can produce big impact when selecting festival placements. Major festivals offer prestige, but niche festivals offer something else.
Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival, which has launched genre films that went on to Oscars acclaim and DreamWorks and Netflix deals, or the Toronto Queer Film Festival, which highlights LGBTQ+ cinema, are likely to draw enthusiastic moviegoers since they screen films made with a specific audience in mind.
Regional festivals, too, attract attentive crowds, without the distraction of Hollywood names. “With the giants, getting in is very, very difficult, and the size of those festivals can lead to a smaller film getting lost in the shuffle,” says Brian Owens, artistic director of the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF). “At a larger regional festival, like ours, a smaller film may have a better chance to shine and find a more appreciative audience.”
Chandler Levack’s debut feature, I Like Movies, enjoyed a well-received world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022, recalls Owens, but dazzled at CIFF shortly after, with Levack winning the Emerging Canadian Artist Award.
“Starting with a regional festival can be a great way to get your feet wet,” says Owens. “You can meet producers here; you can start your journey here.”
While Owens says CIFF isn’t as buyer-oriented as larger festivals, part of its role is to develop momentum, which can help films get distribution.
Prioritizing suitability over size
Film producer Julie Baldassi says her festival strategy is a crucial part of releasing movies. Baldassi’s work has shown at TIFF, Sundance, Tribeca, SXSW and Hot Docs, along with smaller events, all of which were beneficial.
“Earlier in my career I just wanted to get films into the biggest festivals I knew of,” she says, noting that major festivals also launch strong films. Now she thinks more about suitability. “I’ve realized that every festival has its own audience.”
Baldassi produced the 2021 arthouse film Tenzin, directed by Michael LeBlanc and Joshua Reichmann. Tenzin premiered at the comparatively obscure Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia — a smaller market, and the only competitive feature film festival in Northern Europe that’s accredited by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations.
“It’s not a Tier-A festival, but it was a great program, and we got to play Tenzin for people we’d otherwise not have interacted with,” says Baldassi. “There’s a huge amount of value for us as filmmakers and art makers in having audiences watch our film, and communing with other filmmakers in the same place. Maybe there’s less of a financial or career upside, but you never know who you’re going to meet at festivals and where those relationships might lead.”
All festivals have some kind of community component, says Baldassi, which is one of their most important functions, regardless of size or prestige.
Large festivals have advantages, too
“We are living in a noisy world, and visibility is a struggle for so many films, even ones that might appear to be the ‘bigger titles’ at a festival such as the Berlinale,” says Tricia Tuttle, festival director of the Berlin International Film Festival, also known as the Berlinale.
Despite the saturation point that bigger festivals may reach, Tuttle notes that major festivals provide a discovery function, sometimes through word of mouth, and that “higher profile titles can provide some reflected light for other films in a festival by pulling audience and media attention toward the event as a whole.”
Colm Bairéad’s 2022 Irish-language film The Quiet Girl won the festival’s Grand Prix in the Generation Kplus, or children’s, category and went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film the next year. Ilker Çatak’s 2023 German film The Teacher’s Lounge showed in Berlinale’s Panorama program and was then nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar in 2024.
Choose where you’ll make the most noise
So where should filmmakers aim to premiere their movies?
“Any film festival play is good film festival play if you get a good date and a good audience,” says Laurie May, co-president of Elevation Pictures. May says determining the optimal premiere placement is like a game of Tetris with many moving parts to consider — not just timing and eligibility, but where a film will get “the best reaction, the best press and make the most noise.”
It’s important to show films around the country, she says, such as in Calgary and Vancouver, to capture the widest possible audience, which includes people who love film but may not travel all the way to Toronto for TIFF.
“The challenge at film festivals is that there’s a lot going on. Sometimes even if a film is really great, unless it has George Clooney in it, it might not get as much attention,” says May.
“Obviously, the bigger festivals carry a little more weight, but the more laurels, the better.”
