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Submissions FAQ

FilmFreeway Submissions

Rules & Terms

Any work produced and completed in the past 18 months prior to our upcoming edition is eligible for consideration in our general lineup, as well as for our Audience Awards, and may also potentially be placed in one of our juried competitions.

Any work made available worldwide for an online public viewing before or during our dates will be ineligible.

Any work made available for a geo-blocked virtual festival screening - outside of Canada - is still eligible.

If you are unsure if your film qualifies for our Festival, please contact the Fantasia Submissions Team at submissions@fantasiafestival.com before submitting.

Submission fees will not be refunded under any circumstances.

If selected, all commercial/private property including all trademark/copyrighted materials shown or recorded on the project is the responsibility of the filmmaker.

By submitting an entry, the filmmaker states that they are responsible as an agent to promote the film and that the film is an original work.

Participants agree that clips and images from their film may be used and/or published in the Fantasia program guide, on the Fantasia website and for any promotional purposes which Fantasia deems appropriate.

If selected, Fantasia will cover one-way of the shipping cost of the exhibition print/video copy of your film, either incoming or outgoing.

The Basics

If you have a question about your submission, please contact the Fantasia Submissions team through email at submissions@fantasiafestival.com

Our submissions open on September 1st, 2023. For more information, please look at our FilmFreeway: https://filmfreeway.com/FantasiaFilmFestival

Fantasia has four submission deadlines:

Earlybird Deadline: January 1st, 2024
Regular Deadline: February 1st, 2024
Late Deadline: March 1st, 2024
Extended Deadline: May 1st, 2024

We will notify you of our final decision regarding your film via FilmFreeway on June 10th, 2024 (whether accepted or not-selected.) If your film is an early selection, there will be a possibility of finding out that your film has been accepted before our notification date. If we have not yet been in contact with you about your submission, we will not be able to give you an answer before the notification date

The submission cost varies based on which deadline you are submitting to and which category your film falls under. Please refer to the cost and category breakdowns on our festival’s FilmFreeway page here.

Our submission fees are non-refundable. Please make sure to carefully read our terms and conditions prior to submitting your film. Although, if you make a mistake when submitting, fear not, as our submissions team can help you out and ensure you do not lose your submission fee.

Eligibility

Only films completed in the past 18 months prior to our upcoming edition of the festival are eligible for consideration for general programming.

As a general rule, with very rare exceptions, a film that’s been showing publicly on the circuit for longer than a year and a half isn’t eligible for programming consideration.

One important distinction - if the film was completed longer than 18 months ago but was only first shown publicly more recently, it could still be eligible for consideration.

Fantasia will accept works-in-progress as submissions. We accept works-in-progress as submissions provided that you feel that your current version reflects what your finished film will be reasonably well. Hopefully, you should only really be sending these when you have no other choice—like if the film is still being completed as we approach our final deadline. Only submit an unfinished version of your work if you’re certain that you will be able to have it completed in time for our festival dates in the event of it being invited.

Something important to note is that we are not able to ensure a re-watch of multiple versions of your film over the coming months. Your film will be watched once by our programming team, and therefore, you should be sending it to us in a version that best represents the final film. We encourage updates in note form so that we’re kept up to date with the titles that we’re considering, but we can’t promise that the film will be looked at anew!

Any work made available worldwide for an online public viewing before or during our dates will be ineligible. A cast/crew-only premiere does not count as a public viewing.

If your film has been made available for the public to purchase, that to us means it’s been commercially released and would no longer be eligible for consideration.

Stills, trailers, clips, or other similar content can be posted online by your cast and crew, however, without rendering your film ineligible.

In order to qualify as a Canadian co-production, at least part of the film’s financing needs to have come from Canada and at least one of the producers needs to be Canadian. Ideally, either the director or screenwriter should be Canadian as well.

Co-productions can be shot anywhere in the world, but a full-on Canadian production would be financed and shot in Canada.

Essentially, if it were filmed here with more Canadian cast and crew, or if the funding came entirely from a Canadian entity (Like Telefilm or CMF), it would fit more logically in the Canadian submission. If the funding comes from an indie production company, then it would be harder to make a case for it being Canadian content.

Premiere Status Requirements

For Quebec films, we are more lenient regarding premieres and in exceptional cases we may program a film that has been shown in Montreal. For anything else, at the very least, the film must be a Montreal premiere.

Premiere Status Definitions:

- World Premiere: The film will not have a public presentation before its scheduled presentation at the Festival.

- International Premiere: The film will not have a public presentation anywhere outside its country of origin before its scheduled presentation at the Festival.

- North American Premiere: The film will not have a public presentation anywhere in Canada, Mexico, or the United States before its scheduled presentation at the Festival.

- Canadian Premiere: The film will not have a public presentation anywhere in Canada before its scheduled presentation at the Festival.

    Submitting Your Film

    In order to submit your film, you must register and submit your film via FilmFreeway. Visit our FilmFreeway listing here.

    All submissions must be submitted online via FilmFreeway. Online screeners or downloadable files received via email will not be accepted. FilmFreeway allows for direct digital uploads, Vimeo links, or YouTube links. For more information on FilmFreeway project and video uploads, please visit the FilmFreeway help page here.

    You can submit more than one film project to our festival. You must complete separate applications for each project you plan to submit and pay a separate submission fee, but can do so under the same FilmFreeway account. For more information on how to add multiple projects to your FilmFreeway account, please visit this link.

    Screening Formats

    We tend to need DCPs for screening features, but we are happy to help facilitate the process for your film if it is selected. You as a filmmaker will not have to worry about how the film will be screened, as it should not impact their submission.

    It is also important to mention that DVD’s haven’t been acceptable for many years as a submission format. Though blu-rays can be, in a worst case scenario - we try to avoid them as non-professionally authored blu-rays aren’t always reliable as a glitch-free exhibition format.

    Random F.A.Q.s

    1. Who watches my film?

      Each film that comes in through submissions is assigned to at least three members of our pre-screening team and goes through a viewing process and consideration by our programmers.

      2. If I’ve edited my film since submitting, do I need to resubmit it to have the new version considered?

        As a general rule, we don’t watch submissions across multiple cuts/versions as we enter your submission into our pre-screening process as soon as it is submitted.

        You can always change the link on your FilmFreeway page so that when the film is revisited those changes are noted.

        As well, if you want to provide notes on the changes, we can supply these notes to our pre-screeners that watched the film in case they have the interest to revisit and potentially tweak their notes, and I will add them to our own internal documentation.

        3. May we submit more than one film to your festival?

          Filmmakers are welcome to submit multiple productions to Fantasia.

          4. What are your sound requirements?

            We can screen stereo, 5.1, and 7.1, but are currently unable to play Atmos mixes.

            5. Do credits count in my film’s official runtime?

              Yes.

              6. Are subtitles required?

                French subtitles are always appreciated, but not mandatory for your submission. Any films submitted in a language besides English or French, require English or French subtitles to be considered for programming.

                7. Are trailers required?

                  Trailers aren’t required for a submission (but are great to have if a film is accepted, closer to the festival period).


                  ANY FURTHER QUESTIONS?

                  Please reach out to submissions@fantasiafestival.com