You made a movie! Congratulations. Your baby is ready to get on its feet and wander out into the big world of festivals. But where do we start?! If you’ve done even a basic search on “best film festivals," you’ll find the results are endless. With all the avenues available, it can be totally overwhelming to decide where to submit. Through trial-and-error with my two short films "Daisy" and "In Touch", I’ve come up with a few tips that can help you sift through your options, and give your baby the best chance at success. 

It shouldn’t be easy to promote a film about CANCER.  We didn’t have a movie with a built-in audience; no zombies or Zach Braff. What we had was a project our entire team believed in, passionately. We are making a comedy about cancer but we didn't want to belittle/patronize anyone else's experience.  There are five of us spearheading this campaign and we wanted to enter the crowd funding arena prepared… like Gladiators, only super poor ones. Before we became filmmakers, most of us started in the theatre and we already knew how to beg, borrow and scrape. It is part of our theatrical psyche.

Like the Water was born out of many bottles of wine, naive enthusiasm, and a group of lady friends large enough that if one person faltered and screamed, “What-are-we-doing-we-don’t-know-how-to-make-a-movie!” there was always at least one of us having an empowered day who could say, “Nah, we got this.” And maybe because we didn’t know any better, and  maybe because we really believed in what we were doing, and really believed in each other, seven months from the moment I first drunkenly suggested that we make a movie in Maine, we found ourselves doing just that.