FilmFreewayReviews of filmfreeway.com

Some festivals to which I submitted my film appear to be illegitimate or fraudulent. For instance, Prague Shorts Shot, as listed on FilmFreeway, claims to have been active for two years, but their website is only four months old, and they have never screened any films; instead, they've manipulated images from another film festival and incorporated their logo. I uncovered these original images, presented them to FilmFreeway, and received a credit to my account in lieu of a refund, with the service fee I initially paid retained. This credit is now irrelevant to me, as I do not intend to use FilmFreeway again. Instead of offering advantages over direct festival applications, this platform appears to profit from questionable festivals. I urge you not to support this unethical website. Conduct thorough research, select reputable film festivals, and apply directly to them.

They charge you 60 dollars for a submission to a festival and they don't even provide feedback. Like why am I paying you for? They should at least give you an answer.

To get ahead of FilmFreeway on this, who seem to be waging a war against people who speak up - my name is Cadance Bell, an author & filmmaker from Australia who made the grave mistake of using the service in 2020. Since that time I have received many hundreds of spam emails for film festivals - most of which are scams or a notch above. I never requested to be signed up to any email lists and I never imagined that a company would divulge my sensitive & private contact details in this way. If you are a professional in the industry and want your identity and communications protected; avoid FilmFreeway.

Sad to say that I was naïve enough to believe this was a legit website... the obvious bots giving fake feedback was enough to fool me. I can't get my money back but I can stop you wasting yours. Here's what will happen if you submit: Nobody will read your work, they'll just reject it or give you a meaningless title like 'Selected' or 'Quarter Finalist' which means precisely nothing. They advertise services like script reading which never arrive.... most don't even have real contact details or websites you can go to. I dread to think how many people have fallen victim to this. Will be reporting to the cyber fraud division of the police, although I doubt they'll do anything... don't make the same mistake I did!

Where to start?! I receive dozens of spam emails daily to both my company and personal accounts. I only registered these addresses through FilmFreeway, so I know they have not been found elsewhere. I also do not list the email address publicly on my profile. Which means they can only be getting my details directly from FilmFreeway - but they deny this, and claim I must have the address posted elsewhere. There's zero vetting, and zero barrier to entry, which means that there's endless fake or scam festivals that are solely there to take your money and run - and because FF takes a cut, they do nothing to stop this. There is no way to tell if a festival actually shows a film in a cinema environment - even those that post a cinema as the location, there's never images to back it up. FF also takes payment for sponsored listings, which is fine because they have to make money, but the whole front page is littered with ads which means you can easily miss out on actual upcoming deadlines because they are hidden by paid listings. Their additional service fee added to every transaction is also ridiculous - again, especially since they take a cut from the festival too. This place needs a complete overhaul or just a new competitor to swoop in.

As others have said. After successfully using Filmfreeway, I now receive an un-ending quantity of spam from film festivals I've never heard of. Multiples per day. After posting this review, Film Freeway deactivated my account and threatened to sue me.

The awards show company california music awards is the one i submitted too. THey were very unprofessinal not even looking at my submission until 2 days before the event in san fransisco ca! the website says that you can rate your experince but i wasnt able to due to this colosion

WARNING: I just received an unsolicited email from Japan International Film Festival from Chiasa Sakurai who claims to be the Festival Coordinator for Japan IFF. I tried to look up the people involved with the festival(s discussed below) and they don't seem to have any online presence. I then decided to look up the Registrant Organization for the japanfilmfest domain and found that the site was registered to: Pegah Tarkhooni. Curiously enough Pegah Tarkhooni is also the CEO and Registrant Organization for the Munich New Wave Short Film Festival website as well as the Venice FullShot Film Festival (Full Shot cinemag) website. Curious.. I thought. I actually regretfully paid for a submission of my film to the Munich New Wave Short Film Festival thinking the event was online due to the pandemic but realize now it is a way for Pegah Tarkhooni or anyone else involved to have multiple festivals at once and get quite a lot of revenue from artists submitting to seemingly different festivals in different parts of the world (Tokyo, Munich, Venice and how many more?!) that were actually all created by the same person. So nice of them to invite me to submit my film (a $60 fee for an online event!) to the Japan International Film Festival, no? I wrote to FilmFreeway and requested that they look into both Pegah Tarkhooni and the very suspicious film festivals that are disguising themselves as support and community for creatives but were really just created to empty the wallets of hard working artists. Reprehensible. Pegah Tarkhooni care to comment? I would be happy to get a clear explanation and change my review... Contact the festivals you are interested in directly. I will update my review if I ever hear back from the 'people' associated with the 'festivals' or from FilmFreeway with their action plan.