The Circuit

by Steven Rosen
Film festival awards, like those for the current Los Angeles fest, are about the honor and the exposure, true. But increasingly they’re also about the money.

Big money. In fact, there’s a lively emerging competition among domestic festivals like L.A. to see who can offer the biggest, coolest cash prizes to their award-winning films. And overseas, there’s even bigger money.

It’s taking place outside the flagship fests. Sundance resists such prizes for its competition winners, although they often “win” theatrical distribution. Toronto and New York have no juried competitions.

But a notch below these, money matters. “One way for a festival to get attention is a cash award,” says Waco Hoover, co-founder and president of International Film Festival Summit. “Instead of getting distribution, the filmmakers get money toward making their next movie. And there are always advertisers, sponsors and big corporate brands looking for alternate ways to connect with consumers.”

The Los Angeles Film Festival, which opens Thursday and runs through June 29, offers two sizable cash prizes, both worth $50,000 and sponsored by Target: the Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature and the Documentary Award for Best Documentary Feature.

On the East Coast, New York’s seven-year-old Tribeca Film Festival has three $25,000 cash awards – Best New Narrative Filmmaker sponsored by American Express, an unsponsored Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature, and the Cadillac Audience Award Winner.

Currently, Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival promotes itself as having the largest single cash prize among U.S. fests, a $100,000 award for Best Dramatic Feature funded by the philanthropic Max Simon Foundation. It doubled its cash prizes in 2006. The festival promotes “positive” films.

Directors of these festivals uniformly say the cash prizes have been good for all concerned. “The film festival has had tremendous growth,” says Los Angeles’ Richard Raddon. “Having high-profile cash awards helps in getting the best films out there.” 

Nancy Schafer, Tribeca’s co-executive director, explains, “Filmmaking is an expensive endeavor and we want to support filmmakers. We’d love to give them more.”

For Heartland, which has been in existence 17 years, cash prizes were a way to establish credibility for a festival devoted to “positive” films. “There are a lot of festivals out there, so how do you rise above the pack,” says Jeffrey Sparks, president of non-profit Heartland Truly Moving Pictures.

But there is competition on the horizon. They include, among others, the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, sponsored by Vision Forum Ministries and funded by a private foundation, which announced “the top cash prize in the world” at $101,000. It will go into effect at the fest’s fifth go-round in January.

Overseas, the Middle East International Film Festival, which will hold its second installment this October in Abu Dhabi, gives over $1.075 million in total cash awards.

“I can remember long, long ago when to say ‘we are a non-competitive invitational festival’ was something of a badge of honor,” recalls Ron Henderson, co-founder and senior program consultant of the 31-year-old Denver Film Festival, in an E-mail. “But times have changed and the intensely competitive, commercial culture of film festivals reflects those changes.” 

Meanwhile, Raddon knows what he’d do with $1 million. “If anyone came to us with that, we’d tie it to the funding of a film,” he says.


Steven Rosen is a freelance film writer who regularly contributes to Cincinnati CityBeat. He previosuly was the movie critic at Denver Post.