This really useful article confirms how challenging it is to have your film shown at Sundance.
Thanks to Peter Hamilton for writing.
2017 January 6
The Sundance Film Festival will screen 45 feature-length documentaries.A total of 1,701 feature documentaries were submitted.
- 823 were from the U.S.
- 878 were international.
And Then Comes Distribution…
After Sundance selection and buzz, the next needle to be threaded by documentary producers is distribution:
- How many of the 45 Sundance documentary selections will win a respectable theatrical distribution deal?
- Or a television or SVOD deal?
- How many of these films will receive a proper theatrical launch?
- How many will pay for distribution in cinemas, drawing on Outreach funding provided by their backers?
- And how many of those lucky winners will go on to recoup their investment in production and marketing?
- I attended one of the earliest Sundance Film Festivals when I was co-authoring a Case Study analysis of independent film marketing and distribution.
- David Rosen led our ground-breaking Study: it was funded by the Sundance Institute and the Independent Feature Project and published by Grove Press.
- I chatted with Mr Redford at a BBQ at his home, and I can remember that I was startled by his huge forearms. He had played pro baseball. (Years later, I was honored to meet my tennis hero Rod ‘Rocket’ Laver. His forearms were even bigger.)
- The Sundance Festival was then in its infancy. It was almost a Redford family project. There was an attractive naivete about it all. ‘Independent film’ was an emerging social movement that captured some of the creative energy left over from the anti-Vietnam War and counter-cultural tides of the Sixties and Seventies. ‘Indie’ was a quality that was waiting to be defined and branded.
- Who then could have imagined the frantic business that Sundance has become today?
- The signature PBS documentary slot POV recently accepted 16 films out of around 1,000 submissions, for an acceptance rate of 1.6%
- Read more about POV in our detailed October 2015 coverage.
- PBS’s Independent Lens slot reported around 22 films accepted for broadcast out of 725+/- submissions, or a 3% acceptance rate.
- Read about ITVS and Independent Lens in our 2015 coverage here.
- Regrettably, Gregory Crofton’s ‘theatrical feature’ Case Study of ‘2016 Obama’s America‘ is relevant on many fronts this Inauguration month.
- That rightwing ‘bio-doc’ grossed $40+/- million, and its producer David Bossie is a player in Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Additional Research: Gregory Crofton
