by Nina Streich
A new highlight at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was the two-day Forum about “Growing Your Festival Brand” moderated by former TFF Executive Director, Nancy Schafer.
Day 1 brought together a panel of representatives from online distributors and platforms that offer opportunities for film festivals to move beyond their bricks-and-mortar environments.
Fandor, www.fandor.com, provides access to a curated global library of thought-provoking independent films.
Film Buff, www.FilmBuff.com, which is part of Cinetic, is a digital entertainment curator that designs innovative digital strategies to supply content on all on-demand outlets.
Seed & Spark, www.seedandspark.com, is a new crowdfunding and social distribution platform that launched in December 2012 that is non-exclusive and takes no rights.
Snag Films, www.snagfilms.com, distributes over 4000 award-winning films, primarily documentary. Snag is a hybrid platform and digital distributor that offers a growing array of options to filmmakers that also owns and operates Indiewire.
On the second day, Chris Horton, Assistant Director of Artist Services at Sundance, described Sundance as a facilitator rather than a distributor. He explained how Sundance works with all programmed films to help them get distribution and discussed the Festival’s early relationship with Kickstarter.
Tugg is an on-demand theatrical platform (www.tugg.com) that offers individual theatrical screenings of films in their library. Users can request a screening in a specific geographical location; Tugg books the theater and takes care of all screening details but the local community must sell tickets. The local organizers must meet a threshold of sales before the screening can take place.
image courtesy of Google.
