A festival strategy catered to your film.
Built on 200,000 films. 2,000 festivals. 10 years of programming data.
The Problem
How It Works
Film Genealogy
Cocteau identifies comparable films that have already traveled the circuit. Where they premiered, how they traveled, and why.
Festival Profile Matching
Your film is scored against structural criteria across every festival in the dataset: runtime, genre, geography, career stage, and formal risk appetite.
The Delta
The gap between genealogy and profile matching is where the intelligence lives. High-scoring matches that rarely appear in comparable searches are the festivals others won't find on a spreadsheet.
Submission Timing
The generator weights deadlines chronologically to build momentum across your full circuit run.
Premiere Probability
Each recommendation includes a profile-adjusted festival acceptance rate — not the raw submission ratio, but the rate for films matching your specific profile: genre, runtime, logline, geography, and career stage.
What You Get
20 festivals matched to your film
3 strategic scenarios — conservative, mid-range, and ambitious
Programming notes drawn from ten years of festival curation data
5 comparable films with their documented circuit trajectories
Pricing
You pay once, you own the strategy.
About
A film can take years to make. Every cut, every performance, every decision carries weight. And when it's finally finished, the next step is too often a submission portal, a credit card, and a guess.
We built this product because that moment deserves better.
We're two filmmakers who've navigated the festival circuit for the past decade. We know what it's like to face thousands of festival options inside a system built on opaque information, rising costs, and advice that's hard to verify. Festivals aren't interchangeable, yet filmmakers rarely have the tools to see them that way.
By studying large-scale datasets and programming patterns, we found a way to bring clarity to a process too often driven by opinion. Cocteau doesn't make taste-based judgments. It's an intelligence layer for independent film designed by filmmakers who believe distribution tools should be as serious as the films themselves.
Like a true indie, Cocteau isn't funded or sponsored by any festival or studio. We're building better infrastructure to support our community and to continue making the films we love.