There is a moment every indie filmmaker hits. You finish a film, click submit on a dozen festival applications, and then you wait. You refresh FilmFreeway. You check email. You convince yourself that the next acceptance letter is the one that changes everything.
We hit that moment too. Then we changed our minds about what comes next.
The Submission Trap
Submissions are easy. You upload a screener, pay the fee, hit send. The work feels productive because something measurable just happened. A number went up on a dashboard. But the truth is, every filmmaker we know is doing the same thing, and most of those submissions vanish into a stack that no one will ever finish reading.
The math is brutal. A festival with fifty slots will often receive two or three thousand submissions. Your screener has roughly four minutes to convince a tired programmer that your film deserves a place over the other 2,999. Even when you get in, what happens next? You show up for one night, watch your screening, get a polite handshake, and fly home with a laurel for the poster.
Submissions can open doors. They rarely build relationships. And relationships are what move indie careers.
Submissions can open doors. They rarely build relationships. And relationships are what move indie careers.
Why We Are Looking Local First
We have been Philly-based since day one. For a while, we treated that as a tactical disadvantage. Hollywood is across the country. New York is the closest "real" film city, depending on who you ask. The festivals we had heard of seemed to live everywhere except here.
We were wrong about the disadvantage. The Philadelphia indie film scene is one of the most quietly active in the country. Drexel runs a serious BFA program pumping out hungry crews every year. Temple has been feeding the documentary world for decades. The Philadelphia Film Society books year-round programming at the PFS Bourse and the East. The Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Lightbox Film Center, and International House are real rooms with real audiences. They all run mixers, panels, screenings, and Q&As that a working filmmaker can show up to without buying a plane ticket.
Then there is the Jersey Shore Film Festival, which selected Evelyn for its June 4-28 screening window. That festival is an hour and change from our Philly base. We can be in the room for the entire run if we want, and we want.
Our 2026 Plan: Show Up, Then Submit
We are inverting the usual order. Instead of submitting to fifty distant festivals and hoping for the best, we are putting feet on the ground first.
- Auditing every film event within driving distance of Philadelphia, every month.
- Showing up in person to at least two events a month, even when we do not have a film screening.
- Building a list of local programmers, journalists, and fellow filmmakers we can recognize by face.
- Prioritizing short film and screenplay competitions where Philly judges or sponsors are already involved.
- Backing Evelyn's Jersey Shore Film Festival run with on-the-ground presence for the entire screening period.
- Booking time around panels and Q&As where decision-makers are accessible, not behind a gate.
We are not abandoning festival submissions. We are recalibrating where the leverage actually sits. Two minutes of conversation at a screening reception is worth more than two months of submission queue. A coffee with a local programmer is worth more than a stack of laurels nobody outside the festival has ever heard of.
What Sacrum Vindictae III Taught Us
Sacrum Vindictae III is on Amazon Prime, which is a sentence we still have a hard time saying out loud without grinning. It is also a sentence that hides a year of slow, unglamorous work. The streaming deal did not come from a festival win. It did not come from a cold submission. It came from a conversation, which came from a screening, which came from someone in a room remembering our name.
That sequence of events is not a fluke. It is the standard path for almost every indie filmmaker who has ever broken through. The festival wins are the visible part. The conversations in the lobby are the engine. We are not interested in the visible part anymore. We are interested in the engine.
What We Are Actually Hunting For
The honest list is short, and we will keep it that way:
- Press contacts who cover indie film across Philly and the tri-state region.
- Programmers who curate the kinds of stories we tell, character-driven, genre-adjacent, emotionally honest.
- Producers and production companies open to direct submissions, not just agency packages.
- Literary agents and managers actively reading new voices on the screenwriting side.
- Independent investors who back features at our scale, the under-a-million-dollar room.
- Crew, cast, and fellow directors we would want in the room with us on our next project.
That last one matters more than the others combined. Sacrum Vindictae III is on Amazon Prime right now. Evelyn is starting its festival run. The next film we make should be bigger, and the people who will help us make it bigger are already in this city. We just need to be in the same rooms they are.
If You Are a Philly Filmmaker, Reader, or Industry Friend
We want to hear from you. If you run a screening series, a film mixer, a panel, or a screenwriter workshop in or near Philadelphia, drop us a line. If you write about indie film and we should be on your radar, our press address is open and a human reads it.
If you are a filmmaker reading this and you are tired of clicking submit and waiting, come find us at the next event. We are easy to spot. Two guys, usually arguing about a script, usually drinking whatever is cheapest on the menu. Say hi. Tell us what you are working on. That is how scenes get built, one human at a time.
The Year of the In-Person Hand-Shake
2026 is the year we stop optimizing for a notification badge and start optimizing for the moments a phone cannot capture. We will still submit to festivals. We will still chase the calls and the press hits and the streaming numbers. But the spine of the year is people. Philly people. The room.
If you are in the room, we will see you there.