Call for Entries: YoungCuts Film Festival - Deadline: April 30th
The YoungCuts Film Festival is one of the world's most important film festivals for filmmakers under the age of 25 and is for student film makers and non- student film makers alike. It's important because we not only evaluate young filmmakers' short films and feature films for our own Festival competition, but we can also evaluate your film with an eye to establishing its market potential.

This years festival begins on Wednesday August 23 with an opening gala party (held last year at the Drake Hotel) and climaxes at an awards ceremony on Saturday evening August 27. Between these two celebrations, Over 60 of the best short films, feature films, student films and non- student films made by young directors will be screened in Toronto.

For more information please go to our website at www.youngcuts.com or email us at info@youngcuts.com

$90 entry fee?! Most of our movies cost that much.

With an entry fee if $90 it feels like that out weighs the good intention of it and makes money off us poor young film makers

Nah, I don't think this price is too hefty. $90 is for the feature length film and it's $60 for anything under 22 minutes. That's not too bad considering you can put yourself on IMDB if your film gets chosen to be in the festival. It seems like good exposure, and the Toronto Film Challenge I keep doing costs $200 every single time. I think I'll make a short I've been working on and submit it. Good luck to anyone else who participates.

-Kegan

$60 is pretty steep... you can get on IMDB in other ways

I don't know *what* kind of festival you do that costs $200. You might want to look at other options.

A great way to find festivals is to use www.withoutabox.com. They offer a really powerful search engine and they list a *lot* of film festivals. Plus, you can group all the entry fees together and pay them all at once. I've entered my film into 5 different festivals (not one of them had an entry fee higher than $50 BTW, and they were a lot more well-known than YoungCuts).

Just a quick reply to some of the posts about the Entry Fee - We set our prices in line with what it costs us to process the films we receive.<br> What may not be apparent from our website is our judging process - we have at least 3 people screen each submission in order for it to have a fair evaluation. <br> Once a film has been screened and vetted and it makes it into the festival it is then sent to our jury (made of industry insiders) for awards assessement. So you can imagine what it is like to go through and evaluate a couple of hundred films and some of the costs associated with it.(Note the majority of our films are under the 75 min amount)<br>

Last Year we awarded over $25,000 in prizes including software, cash and trips - and promoted the works of the filmmakers to specialty television channels and other markets.

Our goal is to promote young filmmakers and gain exposure for both them and our festival - we are trying to get mainstream audiences to wake up to the fact that some of the best films out there are made by people like you - not the Hollywood System. <br> If you want to discuss the matter further or find out more about what we are doing I invite you to email me at peter@youngcuts.com or call at 514-831-7155.

All the best.

Peter Bailey
General Manager
YoungCuts Film Festival.

It still costs more than Sundance.

I'd pay that much if it were a non-profit or the proceeds went somewhere. Most students don't have that kind of cash to throw at a festival. We are paying $30k+ for school and would rather put that $90 towards making our movies.

Is this festival making a profit?

Just to clear the air for a second, YoungCuts is a Non Profit Film Festival - registered with the Canadian Government as such.

I would encourage you to contact any of the particpants from last years fest to get feedback from them about how they felt things went etc. (you can find their contact info on our website and some of whom are on this site as well).

As always, you are welcome to contact me if you want further clarification.

peter@youngcuts.com

All the best.

P.

I participated in this festival last year and I seriously had the time of my life. I am a film student at the University of Texas in austin so it was quite a trip for me but the experience more then made up for it. The films were some of the best student films i have ever seen and i met a lot of awesome filmmakers and we all went out to eat and talked film all night long and talked about our different filming techniques. I won the best foreign film award at the festival and got so much exposure when i got back to austin, i was in every newspaper here in austin and i had a big premiere. I still talk to a lot of the filmmakers i met up in Toronto and strongly recommend all of you to give yourselves a chance at getting in! My movie is "The Businessman" and thanks to youngcuts i am now listed on IMDB.