REAL TALK ABOUT INDIE FILM DISTRIBUTION AND FILM FESTIVALS

The other day I saw someone post about how film school does not teach distribution well and I agree with that. I went to Emerson College. I ended up actually launching Emerson's first ever film distribution program. I started submitting films to festivals literally within our first year, $350 per film. I was able to get a couple Oscar festival qualifying festivals for these films. Listen, this wasn't like a ton of laurels. I just figured out where was the right festivals for these films to go. And I learned that the board, no one really knows about distribution. It's not just schools of filmmakers. There has literally never been a successful indie film that hasn't had a successful festival run minus The Room. Yeah, the reason that this is important is because there's a huge lack of trust in the festival circuit right now. Filmmakers don't know festivals that are actually right for them. It's so saturated. To put something in perspective, on Film Freeway, there are 5600 film festivals listed in the US. That's a crazy number. I went single every city, every state and figured out what are the actual real festivals that aren't scams and are actually running. And that number is closer to 1400. So there is a massive discrepancy in festivals there that are either not real or fake and they are stealing you. You're... I know if you're a filmmaker, you have gotten those emails that are like, we found your film and we love it so much. Here's a 50% discount code, we're still dropping 20, 30 bucks on submission and festivals are making, if not tens of thousands of dollars by scamming people. It is so corrupt. Forces, I joined forces with two other people, me, John Fitzgerald, who's the co-founder of Slamdance and Tyler Noll, who's the assistant film festival director at Boston Sci-Fi and she's also a data scientist. We all came together and we are actually building a platform that eliminates uncertainty. And it's called Hiike. We built a recommendation engine that's based off of submission categories, requirements and previous films that have been programmed. So essentially, when you come to our platform, and you tell us about your film and yourself, you get recommended festivals that are right for your film based off of things, based off of basic machine learning models. We need to know of data points based off of previously screened at these festivals and what's actually right for these festivals. Where does your film fit statistically? Look at the metrics. There has been no successful independent film that has run without a successful festival run and we're going to help you to get to the top. Thanks.