A festival slate begins long before opening night. It begins in the inbox, in the technical specs sheet, in the quiet decisions a programmer makes about what a feature needs to look like before it ever reaches a jury. For independent filmmakers — especially women directors working outside studio infrastructure, the submission process is the first conversation you have with a festival. This guide lays out what the Female Eye Film Festival expects, format by format, deadline by deadline.
Think of the criteria not as gatekeeping but as a shared language. When a submission arrives correctly formatted and clearly labeled, it lets the work speak for itself.
What's Inside
- Technical Specifications and Accepted Formats
- Screenplay Submissions and the 'Good To Go' Program
- Post-Production Assistance and Work-In-Progress
- Jury Awards and Festival Recognition
- Submission Logistics and Contact Information
Technical Specifications and Accepted Formats
The festival accepts a deliberately wide range of original production formats. Celluloid still has a home here: 35mm, 16mm, and Super 16 all qualify, sitting alongside digital origination. That breadth is intentional. A debut shot on Super 8 carries a texture that a 4K sensor cannot fake, and the programming team treats grain and gate weave as creative choices rather than technical liabilities.
Screening formats are a separate question from how you shot the film. For exhibition, the festival can project 35mm, 16mm, Beta Cam SP, and Mini DV. The gap between your origination format and your screening master is yours to bridge — plan your transfer or telecine early, because securing a clean exhibition copy late in the cycle is where most schedules slip.
Aspect Ratios
Accepted ratios run from 1:1.33 through 1:2.25, with 1:1.85 in between as a standard theatrical option. The festival reads ratio as part of your authorship — a boxy 1:1.33 frame says something different than a wide 1:2.25 scope image.
Warning: Aspect ratio acceptance varies with the available projection equipment at each venue. Confirm your ratio against the assigned screening room before you finalize your exhibition master; a format that projects cleanly in one space may letterbox awkwardly in another.
Screenplay Submissions and the 'Good To Go' Program
Screenplays travel under their own rules. Submit in industry-standard format — proper sluglines, correct margins, scene headings that a reader can parse at a glance. Sloppy formatting reads as inexperience before a single line of dialogue lands. Include a concise logline at the top: one or two sentences that state the premise, the protagonist, and the stakes. A logline is not a teaser. It is a promise about what the script delivers.
For feature screenwriters, the festival runs 'Good To Go', an industry event built around scripts that are ready for the next stage. The program connects writers with people who can move a project forward, treating the page as a launchpad rather than an endpoint.
Running concurrently are the Script Reading Workshops — a competitive track for developing writers. Where 'Good To Go' assumes a polished script, the workshops are for material still finding its shape. Selected writers hear their pages read aloud, which is the fastest way to learn whether dialogue actually breathes.
Pro Tip: Tighten your logline before you tighten your second act. Programmers and industry readers often decide where to spend their attention based on that single sentence, so it earns more revision time than its length suggests.
Post-Production Assistance and Work-In-Progress
Not every strong film arrives finished. The festival accounts for that.
The Canadian Filmmakers Completion Program (CFCP) exists to carry features across the post-production finish line — the color, the sound mix, the conform work that independent budgets so often run out of money to fund. It is structured as a completion bridge, not a development fund, which means it targets projects that are shot and assembled but not yet exhibition-ready.
Films completed through the CFCP are then scheduled for future festival screenings. The relationship is continuous: assistance now, a slate slot later. That pipeline gives a work-in-progress a clear destination instead of an open-ended grant.
The Young Filmmaker Workshop
For emerging talent, the Young Filmmaker Workshop compresses post-production into an intensive four-to-six day phase. Participants move from raw footage toward a cut under deadline pressure, which mirrors the real conditions of finishing a film far more honestly than an open-ended timeline ever could. The compression is the lesson.
Jury Awards and Festival Recognition
Recognition at the festival centers on three primary Jury Award categories: Best Feature, Best Short, and Best Debut Filmmaker. The Debut category matters disproportionately. It signals where the festival places its bet — on the first film, the unproven voice, the director the broader industry has not yet noticed.
Above the competitive categories sits the Honorary Director Award, an annual accolade given to a filmmaker whose body of work has shaped the landscape. It is less a contest result than a statement of lineage, connecting this year's debuts to the directors who cleared the path.
How does the jury actually weigh a feature? Two questions run in parallel. First, artistic merit: does the film command its form, does it know what it is doing with image and sound and time? Second, alignment with the festival's empowering ethos — work crafted by women directors that expands what the screen can hold. Neither question alone decides the outcome. A technically immaculate film with nothing to say loses to a rougher work that earns its convictions.
Key Takeaway: The festival rewards authorship over polish. A clear voice and a film that aligns with the festival's mission will outscore a glossier project that plays it safe.
Submission Logistics and Contact Information
The submission cycle follows a familiar three-tier rhythm: early, regular, and extended deadlines. Postmarked submissions are accepted from the first Monday in January through the last Friday in March. Those dates were not chosen arbitrarily — they were aligned to the post-production cycles observed across independent productions completed in the prior two years, which means the window deliberately catches films as they finish rather than forcing them to rush.
If you submit physical media, plan for the return logistics. Include a SASE — a self-addressed stamped envelope, so the festival can return your screening copy. Preview copies are returned within 45 days after notification when physical media is submitted; digital uploads follow a different path and carry their own constraint.
Digital Asset Requirements
Name your digital files using the convention Lastname_firstinitial_title.jpg. A mislabeled image is an image that gets lost in a folder of two hundred others. Submit press and still images in horizontal orientation; vertical stills rarely fit festival layouts and program materials.
One practical caution on digital submissions: rejection occurs when digital files exceed the server's upload size limits. Compress or split large deliverables before you upload, and confirm receipt rather than assuming a slow upload completed.
These guidelines reflect the festival's recent submission cycles, and specifics can shift year to year as venues and equipment change — always check the current call before you send anything physical or digital. Format your work to these standards and you remove the friction between your film and the people whose job is to champion it.
