Blog: Festivals de cinéma

Could you tell me how I am sure that my film has reached where it needs to go?

It's an excellent question, one that allows us to explain an essential part of how Festhome works, something that is just as important on this blog as anything else we've discussed in recent years.

So how can a filmmaker at Festhome be sure that his film has got where it needs to go?

First of all, a correctly made submission that is in the inbox of the corresponding festival automatically appears on the film's Statistics page (specifically, in Statistics - Submission Status).

By default, until the festival sees the inscription, a red clock appears to the right of that inscription. When the festival has seen it, that icon changes automatically and becomes a blue eye. Once the festival notification date has passed (which also appears there next to the registration) that icon changes again, and there are 3 possible changes:

-If the festival has put the entry in the Selected state, that icon becomes a white thumbs up in white on a green background.
- If the festival has not put it in Selected status, the icon becomes a white x on a gray background.
- Finally, if the festival has not worked with the registration statuses so that we can tell you if you are selected or not, our system will show you the figure of a man with a watch in white on a gray background. We do this because we want to show clearly that we don't make up submission statuses or change them capriciously, so that filmmakers know that we don't have enough information to indicate a selection or non-selection and we indicate it directly, without filters, so filmmakers know what to expect.

In any case, all you have to do is place the cursor on that icon (in any of its different options) for a tooltip to appear that tells the filmmaker what it means at all times and, therefore, what the festival is doing with the submission at any time.

That is the information that filmmakers can see every moment about the status of their submissions.

As a final note, we want to emphasize that we insist that festivals see all their entries, and especially when it comes to festivals with their own entry fee, if we detect problems with viewings from a festival, our system automatically blocks payments until are solved. Although the platform seems to be a simple internally, there is a lot of work behind it, and we take it very seriously that all parties involved, filmmakers and festivals, are satisfied with our role as intermediaries. If we detect festivals that are not fulfilling their part of seeing and evaluating their entries, we do not hesitate to contact them and resolve it.

If that initially censored scene of Kubrick's Spartacus gives title to this blog entry, it is not because I want to discuss the benefits or supposed evils of homosexuality, but because it is common among the cinephile population to establish closed areas of enjoyment and interest. This one prefers the experimental cinema of Stan Brakhage, that one only sees Marvel movies, that one gets excited with the French melodramas of the 30s, the one beyond only sees film noir made in classic Hollywood. Yet, establishing these watertight compartments it is impossible to have a global, complete, broad vision of what cinema is.

Naturally you may like only oysters or only snails, but it is much more enriching to enjoy both knowing that they are different, and therefore being able to see with as much joy the science fiction made in Hollywood in the 50s and the essays of the Dziga Vertov Group in the 60s/70s, knowing that they are different things. And we should be thankful for that, because there is not one single type of cinema that has been possible in 120 years, and counting, of cinematographic history.

Last week, specifically on Friday 21st at night, we suffered a serious problem with the servers that made all Festhome services unavailable for several hours. Although we have already managed to have all the services up and running again, we want to explain what happened and the measures we are taking to avoid, as far as possible, another similar incident, the first one of this magnitude we have had in 13 years.

What happened?

Around 2 AM, all Festhome services became inaccessible. After a quick evaluation, we realised that the problem came from the main database server, on which the rest of the services rely to save and obtain the data pertaining to everything that is done in Festhome. Once the data center operators could physically access the server in question, they informed us that the hard drive was not working, so we started the process to recover the data from another hard drive and replace the failed one to put back the online service. This in itself is not a very big problem, and apart from the time lost without connection, which at this moment was a little over an hour, there would be no further incident. The serious problem arouse when accessing the second disk that contains the instant backups, as it did not respond either. From this moment on, we started working on trying to recover the data from the hard drives so that we could restore service with all the data, but hours go by without much progress and finding more and more problems with the hard drives. We believed that some kind of power outage or something similar had fried both hard drives at the same time, since it is extremely rare for two hard drives to die at the same time. In these 13 years we have never lost a single piece of information or registration and we are very ashamed of this episode.

What did we do?

Once the magnitude of the problem was known, we decided to work in parallel on using one of the backups external to the server to restore the service if we were not able to recover it with the data from the failed server. About 7 hours after the start of the incident, we had the service ready to be restored, but with the data from the last backup that was made external to the server, which is from Thursday morning, the 20th.

At this point, we had to make the decision to wait to recover the data from the corrupted hard drives so that there are no lost shipments or transactions, or to restore service without Thursday's data. After careful consideration, we decided that too many hours had passed without service, and it was important that users could continue to send and watch the movies, and whenever we had he data for Thursday, we would push it back to the new server manually.

This seemed to be the right decision, as several days later we are still trying to recover the other server, but we have less and less hope that we can indeed recover the data that was not saved on other servers.

What solutions have we found for now and the future?

Right now, our support colleagues have been manually rebuilding transactions that users have told us they lost, but it's an imperfect solution. We count on our users to notify us of problems they have had, to manually fix those problems and have all the data as it should appear in their accounts. It's a slow process, but right now it seems to be the only one possible.

As for the future, we're going to increase the redundancy of the databases in the live service with better point-of-failure protections, so that if a server suddenly fails, the service will continue to function. 13 years is a long time without losing data, but if we can be better, we must be, so we are also going to increase the frequency of external back-ups to the data servers, in case there is a similar problem in the future, we can recover data with less loss.

We want to apologise to all our users and thank you for your enormous patience in recent days. It has been many hours without sleep and with great nerves due to ignorance of what was happening. When you have a computer in front of you, it's already difficult at times but at least you can touch it. With servers hosted in bunkers thousands of kilometers away and with which you can only work with a Matrix-style command line, uncertainties and nerves increase exponentially.

June 10 will mark the 41st anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death at 37 years of age, an essential filmmaker who is seldom named now, and even less known, in another act of cinephile forgetfulness that is actually an act of basic ignorance.

If Fassbinder is essential it is because no one (or almost) like him was able to x-ray and show how human relationships are based on possession and the natural cruelty that possession entails, and he did so by creating films that were sometimes cruel, sometimes failed, but always stark, honest and lucid, like that impossible proof of love in In a Year with 13 Moons, or that imaginary happiness in Fox and His Friends. Perhaps the forgetfulness I mentioned above is due to the fact that the bulk of his filmography (an astonishing number of 44 works between feature films for cinema and television, some short films, some miniseries, some macroseries, all made in a time frame of just 15 years) can be described as melodramas, a genre reviled in our days for reasons that elude me, and that Fassbinder learned to love and practice by watching the very remarkable work of another forgotten master, Douglas Sirk. Or perhaps the cause of it is the fact that Fassbinder's work lacks the handbrake, the self-censoring and the sugar coating of contemporary drama.

Be that as it may, it is never a bad time, with or without an anniversary, to remember and celebrate the work of the Bavarian genius, and to declare (contrary to what the title of his first feature film affirms) that the love for Fassbinder's work can never be colder than death.

There has been a recurring debate about short films for years at festivals, professional meetings, round tables, markets, etc. It would be summarized in this question: why does the short film not receive the same recognition as the feature film? The problem with this question (most commonly asked by distributors, but not exclusively by them at all) is that it does not clarify what recognition it is talking about or who would have to carry it out. That is, it does not clarify to whom the question is addressed, so it is impossible to answer.

If we talk about short films as cinematographic works, we must remember that some of the great masters in the history of cinema have delivered great works in short format (Godard, Malle, Varda, Marker, Garrel ...). As a work of art, short film is already recognized throughout the world. But is it as an industrial product?

Following the logic of capitalism, a short film can never produce the same profit as a feature film (in fact, it is unusual for a short film to generate a profit), whether its budget is very large or very small, so as an industrial product it will never have the same recognition as a feature film, naturally, and it would be rather healthy to understand that these two perspectives are complementary and do not exclude one another.

Of all the cinema made under Franco's fascist regime, there are many things to throw into the sea tied with chains so that it never returns to the surface, and some other things (just a few) we can celebrate on, such as Berlanga's cinema. But while Berlanga's cinema is still alive today, there is a moment that represents the cinema of Francoism like no other, and that decades later is still remembered because it also represents what it was like to be a man in Franco’s regime. I am referring to the celebrated moment (in an atrocious film such as Atraco a las 3, by José María Forqué) in which José Luis López Vázquez declares himself "an admirer, a slave, a friend, a servant" (it happens more than once in the film).

Without genuflection, but on his knees, López Vázquez’ character represents several generations of men at the mercy of power, fame, feminine beauty understood as a platonic ideal, and who have a very evident exponent in El Fary when he spoke of the "soft man" without realizing he was also subjugated. The violence defended by people like El Fary only showed their impotence and in 2022 we are grateful because they are disappearing, although gender violence has not, sadly, been extinguished yet.

It is usual among Martin Scorsese fans (I am not one of them) to celebrate the vigor of his shots, the genius of his mise-en-scène, the vital energy that his films give off. But it is much less common to mention his collaborators as essential pieces of that Scorsese touch: despite my love for Paul Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and as a director (he is the author of the scripts of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), I think that the main responsible for the Scorsesian narration is Thelma Schoonmaker, almost exclusive editor of Scorsese since 1967 and responsible for both the bombastic rhythm of The Color of Money and creating some narrative sense in a film as poorly made as The Departed.


Schoonmaker has not worked alone for Scorsese, but almost, and it becomes so difficult to find in a film made by another director the continuation of the movement by cut (movement of the camera or the elements / people in the shot) that is so natural and frequent in the cinema of the filmmakers from New York, that one tends to think that Scorsese films for Schoonmaker, and that Schoonmaker determines the way he shoots.

It is well known that John Ford was an angry despot on his shooting sets, capable of savagely beating his main actors, of publicly humiliating his brother, of throwing his actresses into a swimming pool. An unrepentant alcoholic, he exercised tyrannical violence with the malice of one who knows that he has at his disposal the necessary power to exercise it.

I don't think we can and should not excuse John Ford for those behaviors, neither in the 30s/40/50s nor now in 2022. But neither can we ignore them, as if they were acceptable, nor cancel John Ford entirely, as if we hope that great creators should not have serious character flaws. What we can do is assume the natural imperfection of the human condition, accept John Ford as a great creator with terrible flaws that should never be silenced, and appreciate his films to a greater or lesser extent. It's easy to say, very hard to do.

Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest "What's past is prologue" implying that there is a natural continuity in history and that the present is a direct consequence of immediately preceding historical conditions.


What Shakespeare could not imagine is that in our time there would be a current within the film and TV narrative (especially in the fantastic variant) in which the past is prologue and the present... is also prologue, as if a production seeks to highlight what will happen in an indeterminate future instead of what it is trying to tell, as if what really matters is what it shows and not what it tells, as if the creators cared more about drawing a map than inhabiting it. Thus, we find (to use a very recent example) the 1st season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, in which everything is presentation, introduction, prologue, in which the narration doesn’t seem to have a central interest for its authors, so that everything refers us to a future that is actually in the past, in the film trilogy Peter Jackson made 20 years ago.

My favorite Jean-Luc Godard film is not any of his feature films, but a small 11-minute essay entitled Lettre à Freddy Buache (Letter to Freddy Buache, 1981). In that film, Godard wonders, quoting Wittgenstein, whether "we have made a mistake by calling blue green." And in the search for that conceptual error he will continue to make films all his life, just as Alain Tanner sought the error of time that passes in Dans la ville blanche, or Louis Malle sought the error of individuality in Le feu follet, or Eric Rohmer sought the error of geometric thinking in Ma nuit chez Maud.

Seeking imperfection and error, these masters, among others, have moved away from formal and discursive perfection to find a deeper understanding of the world, and that is a debt we can never pay them back. With the deaths of Godard and Tanner just 3 days ago I have been overwhelmed by a sense of orphanhood, perhaps because the history of cinema is a cemetery. But it is one inhabited by the most beautiful corpses that speak ghostly to us day after day. Thus, Godard and Tanner have found the error of death.

The certainty of the director about "their film", "their work" is an imperative necessity, because in a film crew someone has to be sure (or has to look like they are) of the direction in which the project has to go. But being the leader of the peloton doesn't mean the director can do the race alone. We find many examples in the history of cinema (from Josef von Sternberg to Michael Cimino, from John Ford to Stanley Kubrick) of self-appointed tyrants who enjoyed treating their team as slaves to be mistreated daily, constantly. Fortunately, there are many cases that show the opposite: filmmakers trying to create a pleasant work environment that one wants to go to, rather than one from which we want to escape.


Of course, there is also a minority of directors who film in man-orchestra mode. Directors capable of occupying all fields in a film crew. Literally, a one-person film crew. It does not seem that they create much industry (surely, they do not create any jobs), but their status as sniper-filmmakers is usually accompanied by a meager or directly non-existent budget to make their films, and that does not guarantee full creative freedom, but permanent restrictions that demand control and rigor.

Neither money (the budget) gives happiness, nor its absence implies being able to do whatever we want.

Not many years ago the great Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán gave a lecture in Madrid on documentary cinema. As I have been told (I was not present), an attendee told him that she really wanted to make documentaries but did not know what to make them about. Pato Guzmán (maybe somewhat jokingly) answered her with a question, whether she had a cat, and seeing that this was the case, he added "well, you already have what to do it about. Make a documentary about your cat." The next question, which I don't know whether it was asked by anybody, would be "I have a cat, but what do I say about my cat?"


The confusion between narration and discourse is as difficult to notice as it is old. The cat in this example would help us to build a narrative, but the "what do I say? issue would be the center of the film's discourse. And the what do I say? problem is a much more suffocating one than the what film? Problem is, because it requires a degree of self-critical awareness that is not easy to exercise, and that in most cases is a heavy burden that drowns the creative drive. However, it is necessary to find an answer to the what do I say? Question to understand the cinema that one makes, and to be able to find new forms to develop it.

Ultimately, it's not very difficult to find films the directors of which know what they're narrating, but it's much less easy to find films where the director knows what they're saying.

A few days ago I wondered, while watching a terrible film by Sidney Lumet, what is cinema useful for. While as an industrial product the function of a film is to increase the patrimony of the producers, as a work of art its function is the same as that of any other work of art: to exercise critical awareness and at the same time depicting the zeitgeist of the time in which it is created. And, having said that, we still do not know what cinema is useful for, because the functions enunciated cover only a part of the meanings that the cinematographic fact contains.

Thus, there is a much wider field to cover in order to know what cinema is useful for, but as filmmakers that is one of the least relevant parts of the creative process that culminates in a film. And it is probably an insufferable burden when we need instinct rather than rational intermediation to start that creative process. Do I need to know what cinema is for when I write a script, am in the middle of a shoot or am editing my film? No, I don't need it. I just need to know what I want my film to be useful for, what I hope it will be useful for, and accept with fortitude and honesty that, to quote the master Paul Schrader, "most times a film succeeds for the wrong reasons."

So, if only filmmakers need to know what our film is useful for in that process of 3 different kinds of writing (not at all related to Spielberg): script writing, shooting and editing, which is a process of creation but also one of analysis and self-criticism, we will have to accept that in such process, as in the process of living and dying, we are completely alone.

Víctor M. Muñóz

It is traditional, and to some extent reasonable, to hear the pseudo-cinephile comment “I can’t understand anything Marlon Brando says” Or Mario Casas, to use two names that come to mind when you think of actors "who can never be understood when they speak". it is true that neither of them is a vocalization specialist, but at least in their respective careers they always worked with professional sound teams.

I am surprised (and, in a sense, excited) to see how today's short film maker has at their disposal all kinds of advanced technologies to shoot without any budget (pocket cameras, or simply mobile phones, that shoot in 4K, editing applications that you can use on a laptop, etc.). But, when it comes to recording sound, we commission it to our neighbor’s cousin, or to the one with a hangover, or we choose to use the direct sound that we have not bothered to configure in the camera. If we have actors on set with the diction of Brando or Casas, it is a perfect storm that guarantees that our short film... will be understood by no one.

Of course, is not only the short film makers that can be blamed. While it is perfectly possible to find all kinds of express workshops that teach you the rudiments of shooting with a team, or how to start understanding the basis of film photography, or what are the basics of editing and how to start using the most professional editing applications in a few weeks or months, the equivalent sound courses are always long (1 school year at least) or outright non-existent.

When it comes to short film, sound matters to very few people. And we forget that even if we work with actors with John Gielgud’s impeccable diction, if the sound is secondary in the film crew, he will not be understood either.

Víctor M. Muñóz

We have become accustomed in our daily lives to claiming that size matters. In the affective, the sexual, the family, the socioeconomic levels, we have become accustomed to affirming that more is better, that what is good is big. We also apply it in the cinematographic field, but what nobody seems to be clear about, in the event that size actually matters, is, the size of what?

Applying this common place to cinema, perhaps what we should determine is whether we refer to the $ 356 million it cost to produce Avengers Endgame (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2019), or the almost 5 hours that lasts the monumental and memorable The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophüls, 1976), or how immensely moving is the expressive dryness of Le feu follet (Luis Malle, 1963), or the playful polysemy of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnès Varda, 2000). So, the size of what?



The pandemic that has ravaged the world for more than a year and a half has left us with far fewer vital options than we had, and film production has been no exception. Mandatory confinement, the impossibility of traveling or the prolonged disappearance of group meetings have meant a huge halt in the industry that is not yet completely resolved. But it has also been a challenge for directors that many have not even seen but that some have decided to assume with the courage that characterises genuine creators: for example, Jerzy Skolimowski, at 82 years old, made a beautiful short film (To nie my / It's Not Us, 2020) about the several months long isolation period he spent with his wife on an Italian island where he was going to shoot his next feature film. And we have also had the example of numerous short filmmakers, veterans and novices, who have filmed in their homes, on their rooftops, on their balconies, with better or worse luck, stories that represented a testimony of loneliness and the lack of resources, true, but also of their ability to overcome the context and deliver significant works. We asked and wondered, the size of what?


There are no magic formulas to create works in film (although it is true that, unfortunately, there are more formulas than genuine creative drives), but it is perfectly possible to make a fiction short film about the First World War on your balcony with chopsticks, or a musical-animated short film in the bathroom with pistachios, or a short documentary about your cat's life and its relationship with the microwave. Here I must explain as a reference that, although he has created films such as the series of Histoire(s) du cinéma (which in total should last about 5 or 6 hours), my favorite film of a genius like Jean-Luc Godard is a wonderful short film (Lettre à Freddy Buache, 1982) of just 11 minutes in length in which, halfway between a film essay and a traditional documentary, he dissects with an axe the obligations and ambitions of a filmmaker. The restrictions we have suffered and partially continue to suffer have again taught us an old and valuable lesson: the relevance of the films we create is determined by the size of our genius and our ingenuity. That's what matters.

Víctor M. Muñóz

Submit your film before August, 31st to the 23rd Soria International Short Film Fest



Since 1998, the Soria International Short Film Fest (SOIFF) promotes the short film as a means of audiovisual expression, contributing to its recognition, dissemination and valuing it as an essential means of transmitting culture and an educational weapon. Considering it at all times CINEMA in capital letters and taking this format as essentially and basically a part of CINEMA.



In XXII edition, distributes 19,000 € in prizes. In addition, the festival will cover the costs of accommodation and part of the meals to the directors of the selected short films to attend the festival.



Goya Awards® Qualifying Festival: Since 2016 the festival is AIC (Agency for the Industry of Short Films) approved and is an official festival in the short film shortlist for the Goya® Awards.

Don't hesitate, if you have a short film produced after January 1st, 2020 and less than 30 minutes long, send it before August 31st and participate!

Curtas do Rio de Janeiro International Festival’s call for entries open until August 7



Last week to register your short film to the Short Film Festival – Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival, exclusively dedicated to the promotion and exhibition of short-length audiovisual works. The Festival screens films produced in digital format, with a maximum length of 30 minutes, and is both competitive and informative. The program of the 2021 edition of the Festival will be made up of: International Competition, National Competition, Latin-American Panorama, and Special Programs.


Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its huge impact on the Brazilian cultural sector and funding models, Festival Curta Cinema 2021 will take place exclusively at the Festhome TV digital streaming platform.

Qualifier for the Academy Awards ® and the BAFTA and Goya Awards: The first Brazilian festival to qualify its winners for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In addition, the festival qualify the winners of its Grand Prix to enter the competition for a BAFTA and Goya nomination, according to the rules of each institution.

Registration is open only up to August 7, don't leave it for the last minute!

63rd ZINEBI – Bilbao International Documentary and Short Film Festival is open for entries, exclusively on Festhome!



Created in 1959, the International Festival of Documentary and Short Film of Bilbao (ZINEBI) has won its place as one of the top international festivals, the programming of which (documentary, animation and fiction) is the main symbol of its identity. Meticulous and thorough international competition sections, extremely free and committed cinema that is a real novelty for the audience and helps to build critical thought in the midst of the cultural complexity of contemporary artistic expression.


For its Official Section, the Festival accepts before the 25th of July, fiction, animation and documentary films lasting no longer than 30 minutes, and produced after the 1st of January 2020. In turn, its Official Section – ZIFF-ZIENBI First Film International Competition is open until the 12th of September to opera prima feature films, lasting over 60 minutes, which have not been premiered in the Spanish State and were made in 2021.


Among the festival guests, international judges or awarded authors, great names can be found, such as Roman Polanski, Marco Bellocchio, Jean Rouch, Basilio M. Patino, Julio Medem or Carlos Saura.

OSCAR®, EFA, BAFTA AND GOYA AWARDS QUALIFYING FESTIVAL: Zinebi is accredited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifier for the Oscars® and also a qualifying festival for the Goya Awards, and for British short films for the BAFTAs. As well, is the only festival in Spain to select a candidate for the European Film Academy (EFA) Awards in the Best Short Film category.

Every year since 1974, ZINEBI has been recognised by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) as one of only five Class A festivals of the world in the short film and documentary category, along with Tampere (Finland), Oberhausen (Germany), Krakow (Poland) and St. Petersburg (Russia).

Zinebi's submissions can ONLY be made through Festhome!

Oscar and Méliès Awards qualifier SITGES - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, exclusively in Festhome



The Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia is a competitive festival, speci- alizing in fantastic genre, festival in accordance with the regulations established by the FIAPF. The festival accepts feature films, short films (live-action or animated of less than 30 minutes) and teaser/trailers (less than 10 minutes).


The 54th Sitges will be showcasing the widest range of trends in genre films, through the multitude of styles and visions that coexist in today's panorama. In addition, WomanInFan, has been created with the aim of helping to improve the becoming more and more noticeable and brilliant, presence of female creators in the fantastic film industry since statistics place them at a clear disadvantage.



Qualifier for the Academy Awards®, Méliès and Goya: Those shorts winning the awards for «Best Short Film» in the Official Fantàstic Selection and «Best Short Film» in the Anima’t section will automatically be taken into consideration by the Selection Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Hollywood for the Oscar® Awards. And the best European fantastic genre feature film and short will be elegible for the Méliès d’Or Award, organized by the EFFFF (European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation).

Sitges is a competitive festival in accordance with the regulations established by the FIAPF (International Federation of Film Producers Associations).


Submissions close on JULY 30th and can ONLY be made through Festhome!

Last days to submit your short film to Cine Lebu International Film Festival



Cine Lebu International Film Festival has been contributing to culture and arts for 21 years, enhancing training, education and audiences. Thus becoming one of the main platforms for the dissemination of new talent in the global film industry. In addition, in its programming there is always room to encourage children to love cinema.



Being one of the most important film festivals in Chile, it has spread abroad with sub-branches in Argentina, Spain, Cuba and Guatemala, keeping always the goal to offer Chilean and foreign filmmakers a window for dissemination, marketing, and distribution of short films.



The only Oscars® awards qualifying short film festival from the Southern Cone: The winning short films in the International Fiction, Regional Fiction and International Animation categories will become part of the shortlist from which will come the short films that will compete for the award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Hollywood.

Submissions HAVE NO ENTRY FEES and can be made UNTIL NOVEMBER 30th. Don't miss out on submitting your short film!