A winning festival social media strategy

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Maggie Bera reveals on FilmFreeway: How to Build Real Momentum From Your Festival Run.

Her thesis is that a successful social media strategy leverages a festival screening before, during and after.

“Your festival screening might only last an hour, but the story you tell around it can last much longer.”

BEFORE the screening, build curiosity.

Maggie suggests you “invite people into its world…. Share pieces of the journey: behind-the-scenes photos from production, a shot of your script covered in notes, a short clip of your composer at work, or a story about the day everything went wrong on set. By the time your festival announcement goes out, your audience should already feel like they’re part of the ride.”

Platforms to use here: Instagram, TikTok, X and Letterboxd.

DURING the festival, turn it into content.

She suggests “documenting the experience in real time, in a way that doesn’t feel forced, but rather like it creates a narrative. For instance, you might post a clip of your team arriving at the theater, the moment your film’s title appears on the marquee, a quick reaction video after the Q&A, or a group shot outside the venue. These moments humanize the experience.”

Bonus: we’ve just turned your screening into an event at the festival, one that journalists and other film programmers can discover.

AFTER the festival, extend the awareness.

Maggies suggests that rather than treat the screening as a one-off, position it as one event on “a timeline. To achieve this, stretch the story. Share clips from the Q&A, post audience reaction photos, highlight your collaborators’ work, or talk about what inspired the film. These posts deepen the narrative, [so that] it becomes a conversation.”

She offers these social media strategies:

  1. “Create a visual identity for the film…. When your posts share a visual language, your film becomes recognizable in a crowded feed.
  2. Use your collaborators as amplifiers…, tag people generously… and celebrate their work publicly.
  3. Document the lessons…. Filmmakers on platforms like Substack, YouTube, and FilmFreeway are constantly searching for honest insight into the festival process. When you share what you’re actually learning, you become part of that larger conversation.
  4. Remember the real goal. Social is about building momentum.”

My take: read this post! Maggie’s insights are excellent. I like that not only does she suggest winning strategies but she also tells you why to do them.

Are Canadian movies getting better?

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On Canada Day 2026 Barry Hertz, Deputy Arts Editor and Film Editor of the Globe and Mail, offered his highly subjective list of The 100 best Canadian films ever made. (Article is behind a paywall.)

It’s a fascinating, personal countdown of 100 films spanning the last 60 years. From the article:

“These are movies that inspire, transfix, beguile and enthrall – stories that build a culture, one which can never be broken, subsumed or offered up as a bargaining chip. And they only exist because we all put our money where our mouths are, investing in many of them through Canada’s publicly funded arts institutions.”

As proxies for the Canadian National Cinema, let’s analyze this admittedly small data set.

The 1990s and 2000s feature almost half of Barry’s top 25 picks. The 2010s have the dubious distinction of being the decade with the most films in the bottom 50.

We would hope that the rankings of our Canadian National Cinema would steadily improve each year, but unfortunately, the data shows a slight decline over time. This adds credence to the feeling that Canadian films used to be better.

Fascinatingly, 13 directors (out of 79) are responsible for more than one third of Barry’s 100 choices. Sadly, only two of these are women.

My take: we can do better. Cineplex agrees.

The Audience First Playbook

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Randy Greenberg of The Business of Entertainment: Unfiltered has posted “Creators and Filmmakers: You Don’t Need Permission” on Substack.

In it he analyzes the recent successes of Kane Parsons (Backrooms), Curry Barker (Obsession) and Mark Fischbach (Iron Lung).

He then extrapolates their trajectories to outline his “Audience-First Pipeline” ladder with these four rungs:

  1. “Build the audience through short-form content.
  2. Escalate the format progressively as the craft develops.
  3. Prove the concept at feature length.
  4. Walk into the negotiation with leverage, or skip the negotiation entirely.”

“The job in Phase One is not to make money. The job is to build the audience that funds everything that follows. Short-form content on these platforms is your audience acquisition infrastructure, dramatically cheaper than any traditional marketing budget. [Phase Two] The eight-minute floor on YouTube is the first structural breakpoint. Mid-roll ads unlock. [Phase Three] This is where the filmmaker stops renting the audience to platforms and starts owning the relationship. [Phase Four] When you arrive at a distributor with a built audience and a proven concept, you are not pitching. You are negotiating.”

In summary, “Short-form builds the audience. Mid-form pays the bills. Long-form is the revenue engine. Direct-to-audience is where you own the business.”

This post is so great you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing!

My take: this is a great breakdown that codifies and quantifies the creator economy playbook. What’s so intriguing about this is that technology and digitization made it possible. Previously, the means of production for analogue media involved so many people and was so expensive that “success” was almost always granted by gatekeepers. Now your audience anoints you.

An Open Letter to Minister Marc Miller and Cineplex, Landmark and Guzzo

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On Canada Day 2026, I have one modest question and one modest proposal.

A modest question:

Where is Canada’s National Cinema?

Why did we let the cultural and commercial success of the 1970’s and 1980’s wither? Why has the box office revenue for Canadian features consistently been dwarfed by that of foreign movies, in spite of millions in government funding?

Or, are we truly content to simply sell the labour of our film craftspeople to foreign producers, like Canada exports its raw materials (crude oil, auto parts, gold, copper, iron, natural gas, wood and lumber) to the world?

One answer, as Don Shebib told me in 2008, is that Canada doesn’t have the, um, back-bones.

We can do better, and we can start here.

A modest proposal:

Let’s legislate a Canadian presence on all the movie screens in Canada, starting with a Canadian short in front of every movie.

One short, five to ten minutes long. In front of every movie.

Let Canadians decide online which shorts, by audience vote, to create genuine discovery and stakes.

Playing these winning shorts in front of features will build audiences who feel Canadian cinema belongs to them. Soon this will become a talent development pipeline, not just a programming slot.

My take: I wrote this post because I truly believe Canada deserves a national cinema. Look at South Korea. They’ve had mandatory screen quotas from 1966, scaled them intelligently, and built enough domestic production volume that Korean cinema developed and eventually broke into global markets on pure quality. Canada’s problem is it never committed to a quota mechanism seriously enough or long enough to generate any meaningful effect. The actual competitor for audience attention isn’t Hollywood. It’s indifference. Quotas force a confrontation with indifference that subsidies alone never do.

Indie Filmmakers must BYOA: Bring Your Own Audience

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Hey indie filmmakers, now you get to do it all!

Not only do you need to devise and make your movie, now you have to BYOA: bring your own audience.

I have two sources to quote today: IndieWire and Future of Film.

Daren Smith writes on IndieWire that Indie Film Has an Audience Problem.

He starts with: “The model most of us use is some version of this: put out a handful of Instagram posts, cut a trailer, build a website, and then, a month before release, spray-and-pray ads at every target demographic we can afford…. Add up the time that model asks of a potential audience member. Ten minutes of scrolling + three minutes of trailer + two minutes on the website + maybe an ad or two they don’t skip. Fifteen to 20 minutes across maybe two mediums.”

He then invokes Daniel Priestley’s 7-11-4 formula:

“Before the average buyer says yes, they consume seven hours of content, across 11 touches, on four different mediums.”

That’s a lot of content, potentially 4-5 times more time than your whole movie!

How to accomplish this? I’m going to acrostically label his strategy as EAT-V.

Which stands for Events, Audio, Text and Video.

EVENTS: any in-person gathering related to your project. “It might be table reads, meetups, industry nights, test screenings, salons, a rehearsal open to investors. The format doesn’t matter. What matters is that you plan it, you’re strategic about who’s invited, and you do it more than once.”

AUDIO: podcasts! “And if you can get on a video podcast, you’ve got a “two-fer”. The video goes on YouTube and they post short clips on social. The audio gets distributed on Apple and Spotify and dozens of other platforms. Heck, if the host is awesome they’ll also send out an email blast to their list.”

TEXT: “Newsletters. Emails. Blogs. LinkedIn. This column, right here…. Start with a simple email list, get people on it any way you can, and keep delivering value over time.”

VIDEO: Post short-form video on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. Your long-form video is your podcast appearances, behind-the-scenes videos, and interviews.

Eleven touches means you need hundreds of potential opportunities for your prospective audience to stumble across your project. (And don’t forget to remind people to show up to your live events!)

He truly believes:

“Only half of my job now is bringing a movie to theaters. The other half is bringing the audience with it.”

On the Future of Film podcast, Alex Stolz interviews Lego community strategist Carol Trang.

One key takeaway:

“Show up where your audience already is.”

My take: for all its faults, one thing that legacy media did well was to make sure the audience reached a critical mass. By this I mean that the commercial decisions behind publishing a book, producing a movie or pressing an album were based in large part on whether the audience was large enough to recoup both production and marketing costs, while creating enough profit to be sustainable. In our digital, much flatter, less gate-kept world where cheaper costs mean much more competition for attention, building audiences is harder than ever. And it turns out, the task is much more involved than we imagined.

June 2026: SOTA AIGC

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This week I have one excellent AIGC film, and two very similar AI-generated content pipelines to highlight.

“Paperclip Heart” is the latest film by Tim Simmons of Theoretically Media. Wow.

Of course, Tim also posted another video all about his production pipeline. He implores you to:

“Don’t buy (or sub to) an AI film studio — build one! This is the future workflow of AI filmmaking: a complete production office that lives in one folder on your desktop, and you can download the whole thing free.”

The production office model uses an LLM, an MCP and martini.film to organize the project, cast it, storyboard it and generate shots. The filmmaker in Tim then edits the footage and mixes the sound and music traditionally.

Note that Tim gives you free access to his Claude skills files!

If all this seems a tad overwhelming, see Tao Prompts version of a very similar method: Master 95% of AI Video in 15 Minutes.

The main difference is that this method is more hands on and avoids MCP automation.

Note, both pipelines work best with a great idea — and script — first!

My take: this protocol is the state of the art for AI-generated content in June 2026: use Claude (with a Skill) to design the look of the film, the characters, prompts, locations and storyboards. Use these images to generate shots in Seedance. Edit as usual. I predict that as more and more folks discover this method, the quality of your ideas, script and editing will become much more important.

YouTube to save Indie Film?

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Jonah Feingold recently posted An Open Letter to YouTube: Give Independent Filmmakers a Rent/Buy Button on Substack.

His core belief:

“YouTube should be the home base for independent film distribution.”

All he’s asking for is:

“A rent/buy button that creators can add directly to their own uploads, on their own channels.”

He outlines current distribution strategies and their limitations.

He then delves deeper into YouTube’s model and concludes with:

“YouTube, you’ve already changed how the world watches. Now change how independent filmmakers distribute. Give us the button. We’ll do the rest.”

Behold! It seems YouTube is listening….

My take: this is a great idea! The 30% Google / 70% Filmmaker split would be okay. The YouTube Partner Program eligibility thresholds would be challenging, if not impossible, for most filmmakers (who are not weekly content creators) that release one film a year. Ads interrupting films would be a non-starter too, as would pre- or post-ads, for films viewers have rented with the new Rent/Buy Button.

Shorts Panel at Cannes 2026

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Chris O’Falt of IndieWire tells you What No One Tells You About Short Films: Practical Advice on Festivals, Visibility, Streaming, and Sales.

Well, the panelists he interviewed do.

Chris hosted a panel at the American Pavilion at Cannes 2026 with:

Key recommendations include applying to festivals early, focusing on email list building over social media, and utilizing Kickstarter to cultivate an audience before seeking distribution.

Festival buzz might allow you to sell your short in France. Also of note: Kanopy and Samansa.

My take: get the full Cannes festival experience by visiting this page and listening to the full forty-five minute panel.

AI Feature Film at Cannes, sort of

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Isabelle Bousquette of The Wall Street Journal exclusively reported that: “‘Hell Grind,’ a 95-minute fully AI-generated film, premieres this week at Cannes“.

Well, sort of.

Frank Landymore of Futurism quickly countered with: “Cannes Film Festival Says the Wall Street Journal Is Wrong: It’s Not Debuting an AI-Generated Feature Film This Week“.

He quotes a Cannes representative:

““We can confirm that ‘Hell Grind’ was not screened as part of the official Festival de Cannes program.””

Davide Abbatescianni of Screen Daily elaborates:

“The 95-minute feature cost under $500,000, with most of the budget going on computer costs. The first 25-minute segment required 16,181 video generations to produce 253 final shots, a 64:1 curation ratio. The film was produced by a team of 15 directors, cinematographers and editors, most of them working in person from Almaty, Kazakhstan with some collaborators joining remotely. Alex Mashrabov, CEO and co-founder of Higgsfield, explained that the execution phase took around two weeks, although the under­lying idea and script had been developed by the filmmakers over several years.”

Back to the WSJ for some technical details:

“Every prompt had to be extremely long and detailed. Each one would typically start with a prefix that defined requirements like style (8k IMAX, photorealistic), lighting (natural light only, “contre-jour” backlight, camera on shadow side) and the type of camera it should look like it was being shot on (“cine lens,” 180-degree shutter motion blur). The lighting was key to avoiding the AI sheen that typically gets branded as “slop”. AI-generated video tends to over-light scenes in an unnatural way. That prefix would also have to remind the AI to obey the laws of physics with wording like: “gravity and inertia respected—mass has real weight, correct contact shadows, no floating props.” The individual prompts were, on average, 3,000 words each.”

My take: It seems Higgsfield made a 22-minute short a month ago and then decided to extend it to feature-length. Seriously impressive — no wonder they decided to go for it.

How to fix Canadian Film, Part 2

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Annelise Larson of Veria has just released a report called Navigating the Shifting Screen in an Era of Policy Reform.

The core of her thesis is that:

“Canadian film policy cannot be future-ready unless audience strategy is treated as core infrastructure.”

Further she says,

  1. The audience is in charge.
  2. Hyperlocal community matters more than ever.
  3. We need to redefine market demand.
  4. Data transparency is non-negotiable.

She rightly believes that:

“If we want Canadian films to succeed, we need to recognize the many ways audience demand now shows up before, during, and after release. We need policies and programs that sustain and help grow real audiences across the full life of a film. That means strengthening independent exhibitors, community screenings, impact dissemination, discoverability, data collection, audience research, and flexible release strategies.”

Read more here and download the 62-page report.

My take: Recall I called out Annelise’s decade-old dire prognosis for Canadian Film on this blog recently. My six-point strategy to fix Canadian Film remains the same, eh.