[This Savage Art]

Technology has upended everything from the music industry to shopping to how we get our news. Why should film festivals be any different? Scott Kirsner has a post announcing the first feature film, The Cult Of Sincerity, to debut on YouTube. That’s quite a feat and definitely raises some serious questions for any filmmaker creating content nowadays. New rules, more options, different workflows.

The film’s producers chose to just bypass the whole accept/reject process of the film festival and offer it up to whoever wants it for free. As compensation they will earn money if viewers sign up for a music service for a fee in order to watch the film online. It’s not the first film to set up this kind of structure but it’s obvious the distribution model is going in a different direction. One of the key questions that comes up is; will your film play better on the internet? Meaning, will it find its audience from online viewers versus a theatrical release? If you have a twenty-something post-college comedy [far from a new concept] like this one, your demographic is already sitting in the theater, their laptops. If you have an oddly sweeping, landscaped epic shot with anamorphic lenses on 35mm, maybe not.

Either way it seems that this new process of cutting out the festival middle man might have a serious trickle down effect. There are so many festivals right now, too many to even count [Okay, I'll look it up. Around 4,000 worldwide. Source: FilmFestivals.com.] Will online festivals and distribution put a crimp in real world film festival attendance? It seems that if festivals aren’t programming important, relevant films that need that exposure to push them into the stratosphere you might have an answer sooner than later.

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