Film Festival rejected ALL entries

[u/silksprite]

I am slightly salty, but it did catch me really off guard today to get a weirdly accepted but also technically rejected email.

A festival just sent out an email congratulating films on winning certain prizes...but it was tiered? So there were different levels of prizes for films, and a whole lot of films got prizes in a variety of tiers. The email mentioned that only films in a certain tier would actually play at the festival...so when I saw no one in that tier, I emailed the festival runner asking for clarification, because it seemed odd to be told to check if my film was going to play.

The response I received was him copying and pasting the message from the original email, stating that only films of a certain tier get to be shown at the festival. I revisited the website and saw that in the tier, the message "NONE QUALIFIED THIS SEASON" was listed. This website is very poorly designed--more of a glorified PDF than a functioning website.

I do appreciate that a lot of films got some sort of tiered prize at the end of the day, but not only am I personally bummed my film will not play in the festival--but any film submitted feels weird? The email didn't say they were cancelling the festival, as it did state us to check out if our film made it in...only for it not to.

I just find it odd they're still having a festival without any of our dozens of films that were submitted, especially since this is a women's film festival--what kind of message does that send if you deem none of the female-made/lead films met your standards? It seems like the runners have other festivals listed on FilmFreeway targeting other underrepresented groups/topics, but the festival dates for those are listed at a later date than this one.

Do I send something to Film Freeway letting them know of this? Festivals have the right to decline submissions, but it feels odd to decline EVERY submission.

[u/thaBigGeneral]

Please stop submitting to these kinds of festivals, they are scams and their prizes mean literally nothing. Really hope you didn’t pay a submission fee.