Skip to main content
Workshop

IDAinsight: Festival Strategy Workshop

-
PT

  • A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.
    Abby Sun, Moderator
  • Headshot of an adult woman with light skin tone, blonde shoulder-length hair wearing a red and orage long-sleeved shirt and gold hoop earrings.
    Marielle Olentine, Speaker
Green and blue flyer for IDA Insight: Festival Strategy Workshop

Date: Thursday, February 20, 2025

Time: 10:00 am - 12:00 pm PT

Location: Location: Virtual on Zoom and at the IDA Office, 3600 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 1810, Los Angeles, CA 90010

Event Description:
A very small number of film festivals seem to hold an enormous amount of sway over a film’s sales and distribution prospects, as well as the filmmakers’ chances at creating a sustainable living through filmmaking. This perception drives many filmmakers to pin their hopes on just a handful of market-driven festivals that are most important in their region, whether it’s North America (where Sundance looms large), Europe (Cannes, which accepts very few documentaries), or elsewhere. In reality, there is a vast ecosystem of film festivals that can all contribute to the healthy life of a documentary film project and distribution that doesn’t rely on the catalyst of perceived film festival success. 

In this workshop, IDA Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary Magazine Abby Sun will walk filmmakers through the process of developing a film festival strategy that takes the particular expectations, needs, and prospects of your individual film into account. Guest speaker Marielle Olentine (producer of Three Promises) will provide a case study drawing on Marielle’s own experiences navigating the film festival circuit without a sales agent.

With the festival season upon us, don’t let a rejection from major festivals like Sundance derail your plans. Join Abby for this popular workshop, which has proven successful for filmmakers and producers like Marielle, a former attendee. This session includes a presentation, followed by interactive workshopping of two films-in-progress. IDA members can submit their project for workshop consideration. All attendees are encouraged to take the opportunity to reassess and refine your festival strategy.

This seminar will cover:

  • Evaluating one’s expectations and desires from a film festival run
  • Festival strategy before a film is finished
  • Researching film festivals and finding comps
  • Researching, networking, and maintaining contact with festival programmers
  • Sales/festival agents pros and cons
  • Waivers, deadline extensions, and other negotiable items with film festivals
  • Tradeoffs between different types of festivals (niche, regional, documentary-only, established market or not)
  • Film festival markets (such as IDFA’s Docs for Sale)
  • Festival screening fees and travel stipends
  • A case study featuring Three Promises (2023), with the film’s producer, Marielle Olentine, providing details about the film’s world premiere at Visions Du Reel and its successful festival journey and direct distribution after attending a previous IDA Festival Strategy workshop
  • 20 minutes each workshopping festival strategies for two projects, with personalized feedback from IDA’s Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary Magazine Abby Sun and guest speaker Marielle Olentine
     

RSVP Required

This workshop is open to all participants, IDA members can apply to be considered for workshopping festival strategy for a current project.

Interested in submitting your project? Become an IDA member today.
 

Project Intake Form:
Filmmakers with projects at any stage are encouraged to attend. This event will include two 20-minute workshops on IDA members’ projects to model festival strategizing. If you are an IDA member and would like to be considered for this portion of the event, please fill out the additional Project intake form available through the MyIDA portal. 

Please complete this form by Monday, February 10, 2025, to be considered for the workshop portion.

The first hour of this seminar, which will include the case study, will be recorded and posted online after the live event. The workshop portion will not be recorded.

Access:

ASL interpretation and Cart Captioning will be provided for the presentation portion of this webinar. If you would like to extend ASL interpretation and Cart Captioning for the case study portion, please email your access requests to membership@documentary.org by Monday, February 3, 2025.

 

Event Participants

    A person sits in a director's chair at a festival, holding a microphone.

    Abby Sun

    Abby Sun (she/her) is IDA's Director of Artist Programs and Editor of Documentary magazine. Before joining IDA, Abby was the Curator of the DocYard and co-curated My Sight is Lined with Visions: 1990s Asian American Film & Video with Keisha Knight. As a graduate student researcher in the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Abby edited Immerse. She has bylines in Film Comment, Filmmaker Magazine, Film Quarterly, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, and other publications. Abby has served on festival juries for festivals like Hot Docs, Dokufest, Palm Springs, and CAAMfest, as well as nominating committees for the Gotham Awards and Cinema Eye. Abby has reviewed projects for grants and markets such as IDFA Forum, BGDM, NEA, SFFILM, LEF Foundation, Sundance Catalyst, and spoken on and facilitated panels at Locarno, IFFR, TIFF, NYFF, and other film festivals. Along with Keisha, Abby received a fall 2022 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She produced Shared Resources and, with Jordan Lord, received a 2022 American Stories Documentary Fellowship for the upcoming The Voice of Democracy. Her hometown is Columbia, Missouri, US.

    Headshot of an adult woman with light skin tone, blonde shoulder-length hair wearing a red and orage long-sleeved shirt and gold hoop earrings.

    Marielle Olentine

    Marielle Olentine is a community-driven designer, multimedia storyteller, and award-winning filmmaker championing a collaborative and regenerative approach to filmmaking and design research.

    As a storyteller, she seeks to weave together narratives that honor, celebrate, and bridge differences, finding inspiration in the interconnectedness of the natural world and the devotion of oral story-keepers across the globe. Her work has appeared on VICE, Condé Nast, Al Jazeera, and HBO and has premiered at festivals like TIFF, SXSW, Visions du Réel, and CIFF. Most recently, her and Yousef Srouji’s film Three Promises won Best Documentary at Camden International Film Festival & DocPoint, as well as Audience Awards at DocsIreland & MENA Film Festival.