One of the best things about making a film, is sharing it with audiences across the world. We are so excited to announce that She Lives Alone will be screening at the Academy Award qualifying festival Out on Film.
The film will also screen at the Edinburgh Short Film Festival and the Prague International Film Festival, where it is in contention for the Best Cinematography award, for Lizzie Gilholme.
Creating a festival strategy is an important part of a film’s journey. It isn’t just a case of submitting a film to any festival that’s open for submissions. When it came to She Lives Alone, we thought about genre, geographical region, the quality of the film we made and the filmmaking team.
She Lives Alone was made on a budget of Ten Thousand Pounds, which is not a lot of money when you consider we were making a period horror film set in a remote location. The goal was always to create a film that gave the impression it was made for more than it’s actual budget, so production value was at the heart of every conversation we had during development and prep. Once we were in post production, we were able to get a sense of the final film, and that is when we started to think about where we might want the film to premier and what other festivals it could suit.
Festival planning requires lots of research. Over the years Candle & Bell films have screened at a fair few festivals so we already have a bank of research and first hand experience of festivals. Still it is a resource that is always developing and being modified the more experience we garner. We decided we wanted to hit film festivals that had at least one of the following elements:
Focus on horror genre;
Focus on female filmmaking teams;
Focus on LGBTQ+ stories;
Supportive of films made outside of London.
We had five festivals that we targeted as World and UK premieres and were accepted into two, Out on Film and another soon to be announced festival! Both those festivals fit the profile we wanted, and both of them are highly respected festivals within the film industry.
We then targeted similarly prestigious film festivals that take place in 2021, combined with festivals that fit our criteria and have lots of industry events and draw good crowds to the screenings. Edinburgh Short Film Festival and Prague International Film Festival are two good examples of festivals that are committed to audience and industry engagement.
Audience engagement isn’t just the job of festivals, we want friends, family and social media followers to watch our film. So we worked on a poster design plan, capturing the mood and tone of the film. Our stills photographer, Macauley Cullen, was on hand during the shoot to take behind the scenes photos and production specials, precisely because we wanted strong photography to drive interest in the film. We’ve also got a behind the scenes documentary in the works, but that will be released alongside other festival releases.