Students at film schools, take heart! The student film festival circuit is alive and well at home and abroad. If you keep working hard in your film courses, you could see your movie get accepted in a student film festival. Here are some of the film festivals for you to consider submitting to while still in film school. Toronto International Film Festival, they may not be. But you have to start somewhere if, one day, you want the world to line up for the privilege to see the fruits of your labour.
The Montreal Student Film & Video festival is for students of film schools in Canada. The goal is to discover new talent currently enrolled in film courses. Montreal also offers another student film festival, the Young Cuts Film Festival. Unlike the afromentioned festival, which is only open to people at Canadian film schools, the Young Cuts Film Festival is open to students from around the world.
For students enrolled in film schools in the metropolis, Toronto Youth Shorts Film Festival is a volunteer-run nonprofit that gives a chance for Toronto's emerging filmmakers to showcase their work.
Queen's University offers a yearly video-making contest for its own students, asking them to create a short on the theme of online summer school courses.
Another film production school, Toronto's cinema studies program at the University of Toronto - or, more specifically, Hart House, U of T's "living laboratory of arts, culture and recreation" - organizes a student showcase that is open to students from film schools in Canada, but where priority is given to submissions form the Hart House and U of T community.
Other film schools offer student festivals that are open to students from all over. The University of Regina's media production and studies department organizes a festival called Living Skies that is open to students from around the world.
Similarly, students from movie production schools all around the world are invited to submit to the Toronto Student Film Festival, which is billed as a showcase for underground cinema.
Students of film schools in Canada can also submit to such international movie festivals as the Beijing International Student Short Film and Video Festival or the Angelus Student Festival.
The world's largest movie festival, which is held at Brown University in Rhode Island, is also open to students at Canadian film schools.
So what are you waiting for? Get out on the festival circuit today! Submit your best work now and see where it leads you!