I was really excited to see a festival dedicated to dark comedy, and I was honored to be part of it and win two great awards. I was bummed that the festival ended up being virtual, but Eventive is a great platform and the tickets for the blocks were reasonably priced. I also liked that tickets were giftable and that each film received a few festival passes to share with cast/crew/friends/family. I imagine running a film festival is a huge undertaking so kudos to DCFF for the effort.
However, the festival felt disorganized, impersonal, and had little attention to detail which was disappointing after the hefty submission fee.
The festival had only switched to virtual around the time of submissions closing, which means everyone who submitted thought it was in-person. There was no explanation or apology for this change, and for some filmmakers it doesn't matter, but that's a big consideration for some when submitting. There were no forums for the filmmakers to meet each other or show support, even virtually. There were only three films out of almost 80 selections that were promoted on the festival’s Instagram and Facebook pages. The website had no description of the festival director or a list of who was on “the panel.” Most of the trailer links didn’t work on Eventive—the ones that didn’t work could’ve been removed.
There was an odd “techincal ballot” in addition to Eventive’s 1-5 rating for the audience award. It was never officially described or shared, and the link on the Eventive player page wasn’t obvious—I randomly noticed it as I was double checking my film’s info. It was a Google form that didn’t track unique votes or email addresses or otherwise ensure that people had seen any of the films they were voting on. Upon announcing awards, the festival director said the ballot was weighted with “the panel’s” decisions, which did end up spreading out the awards between multiple films so that was positive, but DCFF’s awarding system seems suspect.
It was also impersonal how the cinematography certificate was awarded to me, the director, instead of the cinematographer, so I couldn’t post the image or share it with the DP.
There weren’t any laurels for my two category wins in the Google Drive from DCFF, and the ones that were there used the default FilmFreeway laurel which seemed a bit lazy considering the Official Selection laurel had the cool DCFF logo. All of the laurels were also in JPG format, so to put them on the poster I had to manually remove the background. It would’ve been nice to receive PNGs with an alpha channel.
The festival was still young in its third year, so I really hope it improves over time because there are a lot of dark comedy fans and filmmakers who could feel right at home here.
