This month at The State of Cinema, rather than having an editorial, I would like to propose to you an investigation that I have been working on over the course of the past weeks, animated by the wish to research the murky waters of phantom film festivals. In the first material in this series, I will present the case of an event that, in spite of its quite hefty online presence, seems to have simply evaporated: this is the story of Wallachia Film Festival, whose third edition didn’t take place between the 10th and 12th of September 2021.

1. Context. FilmFreeway and phantom festivals

Some of our readers might be familiar with FilmFreeway, an online platform that offers a means for filmmakers (most of them debutantes) to submit their work to no less than 7000 festivals, which, in turn, use the website to prescreen the films and work through their selection process. However, few of these filmmakers know that this platform has, in time, become the base mechanism of a series of fraudulent events, whose logistical quality oftentimes does not fulfill even the most minimal of requirements that are needed for a decent film screening, or that are even outright non-existent – according to an investigation published by The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. (Another method is to simply steal the identity of an already-existing festival which has a given amount of fame, but that does not utilize the platform’s services, with the aim of fraudulently cashing in on subscription taxes – the BIEFF experimental film festival was one of the victims of such as scheme, at the end of 2020.) This phenomenon doesn’t seem to have avoided the Romanian festival ecosystem.

There are two main types of “phantom” film festivals in Romania: either events that are made for the express purpose of obtaining public funding (especially those meted out by the Romanian Film Center, the CNC), or those who exist in order to cash in on submission fees through a platform such as FilmFreeway. (Sometimes, given events seem to fit both categories at the same time.) The purpose of the latter type is to exploit amateurs’ and young filmmakers’ lack of knowledge about the functioning of the festival circuit in order to determine them to pay (often pricy) submission fees for their events, luring them in by promising them diplomas of participation or “laurels” in exchange, as the Hollywood Reporter article explains. That is, participation logos that filmmakers can paste onto their promotional materials, that are made to imitate the aspect of those emitted by the big film festivals. However, for the most part, these laurels hold little to no weight in the “legitimate” film industry, but filmmakers may perceive them as a benefit – be it to “tick off” an award or selection, to attempt to finance a future project on its basis, or to simply know that their film has been shown somewhere in the world.

In contrast to events which are sponsored from public funds, where the law obligates organizers to provide documentation that proves the fact that these projects have been implemented, the territory of “DIY” film festivals is much foggier, oftentimes passing by unnoticed, and which usually cannot be held liable due to the absence of a legal framework which would control its functioning. HR’s 2019 investigation prompted the elimination of 42 events from the platform and even led some professionals to call for a stricter regulation of the small-sized festival circuit – yet many of these frauds are still under the radar. “It’s horrible to know these fraudulent film festivals are out there while you’re busting a gut running a legitimate operation,” as Katie McCullough, the leader of an organization advising on festival strategies, was quoted saying at the time.

The investigation published by Hollywood Reporter made me regard the realm of obscure festivals in Romania from a different perspective; first, at a distance, then, with an increasingly critical gaze. Ultimately, not only is there a very large inflation of film festivals on the Romanian market, which might seem unjustifiably big for an industry that is still rather small, and in a country that doesn’t excel when it comes to consumption of arthouse cinema, nor when it comes to the numbers of independent cinemas – and, at the same time, there is also a large number of young filmmakers who are unaware of the ways in which the festival circuit functions, who are hoping for their works to be selected and screened at an event, making them prime targets for such operations. Enter Wallachia Film Festival.

1. Wallachia Film Festival: the mysterious festival that seems to have suddenly vanished

Initially, and from a distance, Wallachia Film Festival looked to me like yet another micro-festival from Bucharest; I must admit that what caught my eye at first (after finding out about the festival after being invited to add one of its social media pages) is that its trophy is a wooden statuette of Vlad Țepeș, the medieval lord who inspired the figure of Dracula – and who, apparently, has extended his “high patronage” (!) to the festival, according to one of its press releases.

But, beyond any excentricities, the next thing to catch my eye and pique my interest was the fact that the festival’s social media pages, despite being filled with promotional materials of (mostly wildly obscure) films stretched over entire months, suddenly comes to an end on the 9th of September 2021 – one day before the slated beginning of its third edition. What draws attention here is also the fact that the festival is seemingly announcing its selection on a film-by-film basis, using individual posts over a time-span of several months, in contrast to the field’s standard practice, which has a festival announcing a larger amount of films at the same time – usually, it’s either the entirety of the selection, or, at the very least, the contents of a side-bar or competitional program.

I have not managed to identify any media coverage of the festival itself, no external film reviews or festival reports, beyond what seem to be their own press releases, which were republished without modifications by several outlets. Although it has a small number of followers on Facebook (636, to be precise), it’s follower counts on Instagram (3,109) and Twitter (1,791) are considerable, but one must note the fact that the festival’s accounts have a much higher following-to-follower ratio (following 7495 accounts on the first, and 4,024 on the latter).

I thus decided to dig a little bit deeper and to document this case as much as I could – a process which spanned several weeks and implied a lot of effort in order to obtain concrete information. Wallachia Film Festival does seem to have truly taken place in the years of 2019 (when its screenings took place in Londohome, a pub in central Bucharest, and in…what seems to be the backyard of a poolside villa) and 2020, when an aftermovie (or, better said, a clip lasting for a minute and a half) was shot. In it, we observe a handful of tables where maskless people are seated (despite the circumstances of the pandemic at the time) in the yard of the Gallery café, in a central neighborhood of the capital, a few framed photos, most importantly, a projector that is placed in a room where we can see a couple of folding chairs, to which a young man dressed in a Templar costume seemingly guides us to. Certainly, it’s an event that doesn’t have a lot of financial means at its disposal, but, nonetheless, still a physical event. Even so, although I searched all across the internet to find any trace of its 2021 edition, I found none whatsoever – which made me search even deeper.

To make matters more curious, the festival’s website, beyond a handful of PR-style quotes (“Just think cinetopia!” seems to be a motto of sorts), does not have a page dedicated to its team of organizers. Its „About Us” page is only 200 words long, and more than half of them are a short summary of the life of Vlad Țepeș, the rest being mostly PR-istic catchphrases with no tangible content – however, a few Internet searches reveal the identity of its founder, in the person of Ms. Lorena Manolică, who at the same time seems to be the founder of the “Agency:Wiz” marketing company, which is featured as the festival’s main partner in its press releases. I thought this might be the person to clear up any confusions – however, our call only made me ask even more questions.

Having been contacted on the phone, Ms. Manolică was unable to tell me how many spectators the festival had this year, how many films it had in its selection and the number of awards that they are awarding (and how many of these are also awarded in money or their amount, only indicating that such awards would indeed exist). Claiming that she was unable to personally attend the festival, the founder only gave us one concrete piece of information: that the festival had been hosted by a restaurant in the center of Bucharest, while promising to come back with other data by email, amongst them, she claimed, photos of the event taken by one Tudor Voican, one of the festival’s co-organizers.  (However, by checking said restaurant’s social media pages, I could find no photos or other traces that they had hosted the Wallachia Film Festival, either.)

I waited for Ms. Manolică’s reply for two weeks, and it has so far not arrived until the day we ran this article. However, I managed to piece the requested information together by using Wallachia Film Festival’s official website and its official FilmFreeway page. On the other hand, what I could notice before publishing the article is that the festival’s homepage had a small facelift after my call with its founder, which seems to answer at least some of my enquiries, but the new info is still at odds with what I will show in the following section, which is also featured on their website.

2. Rules, regulations, numbers

According to FilmFreeway, Wallachia Film Festival has no less than 15 categories and competitive sections. Beyond a number of awards that can be granted to any of the films that are present in the entirety of the selection, there are also competitive categories for various lengths (micro-, short-, medium- i.e. „featurettes” and feature-length), each of them sub-divided in major cinematic genres (fiction, documentary, animation and experimental), along with student films, music videos, trailers, works in progress, series, advertisements, fashion films, films shot on smartphones (!) along with various types of scripts. In short, this looks like a list of just about any single type of cinematic expression and form one can imagine, which already seems difficult to contain in the context of an event that is only seemingly three days long.

All these categories have at least one main award (yet many also have multiple sub-categories of their own), along with four types of distinctions: „Diamond”, „Platinum”, „Gold” and „Silver” awards. Some categories are additionally split in accordance to genre, thus increasing the amount of possible awards four times over. The full list of awards can be found here – but, by counting all of them, I came to the total number of 269 possible awards that are given out at the Wallachia Film Festival.

At the same time, these are some of the event’s fine-print rules: a filmmaker may submit multiple entries as long as they pay a tax for each of them, no film may be pulled out of the festival after submission, and the submission fee cannot be reimbursed once it is paid. They also stipulate the fact that the festival “reserves the right to make any necessary changes, postponements, or cancellations to competition scheduling, screenings, categories, prizes, rules, regulations and Jury membership”, and the fact that, by submitting their film to the festival, filmmakers “agree to hold us, our affiliates, our employees and partners harmless from any claims and damages”.

The culminating detail is its list of awards (which makes no mention whatsoever of any awards that are granted in money). A grand total of 476 films and other various projects are featured on this list (apart from a retrospective dedicated to a producer named Ferdinand Lapuz). This list seems to simultaneously serve as the full line-up of the festival’s third edition. Using a search tool, this list reveals 113 instances of the term “best”, 110 usages of “award”, 61 for “mention”, 40 for “finalist”, 17 for “nominee”. In short: 341 terms which imply a sort of award or distinction, making up for over a third of the total number of films.

Now, let’s do a short exercise in imagination. Let’s ignore the fact that the festival claims here that it selected 53 (!) feature films. And let’s eliminate all scripts, showreels, trailers, series episodes, music videos, fashion films and smartphone films from this list. Last, but not least, let us assume that all the films that remain after these eliminations (326, to be more precise) are all exactly 5 minutes long. Even under these conditions, it would take 27 hours for all of these films to be fully screened – and apparently, over the course of just three days.

3. Submission fees and marketing methods

This is the moment we might ask ourselves – why would someone put so much effort into a festival that announced no details about how it’s going to take place, and that has posted no program and no photos? I’d say that the conclusion is quite simple, from my point of view: for the money cashed in from submissions via FilmFreeway. For the time being, the festival does not accept any submissions, so we used Wayback Machine (a tool which allows users to see previous versions of a given webpage) to see what its FilmFreeway submission fees were for each type of film (which can be checked in the drop-down menus in the lower-right part of the page).

The fees are split in several windows of time, ranging from “extreme early bird” to “final deadline” – where we see that these prices vary between 17$-35$ for features, 19$ and 29$ for featurettes, 11.50$ and 25$ for shorts, and so on, with certain discounts for Gold members and students. Even if we were to assume that each of the aforementioned 476 films that were part of this year’s selection were submitted at the earliest possible term, and that all of the submitters were Gold members or students, we get the following sums:

• 867$ for features (53),
• 1,349$ for featurettes (71),
• 1,483$ for shorts (129), 
• 690$ for feature-length scripts (46),
• 402$ for micro-films (35).

A total minimal sum of 4,791$ – which only touches upon a few of the festival’s sections, from which FilmFreeway keeps anywhere between 4%-6% of the total submission revenues, according to their own rules.

This data also allows us to understand why Wallachia Film Festival emits such an enormous number of awards: effectively, it’s a way to create massive publicity for this event, as the vast majority of winners will end up posting about these awards on their own social media accounts – and they will even end up spilling into the foreign media, as this article published in Cosmopolitan Philippines shows..

What is striking in these circumstances is that the festival has a GOLD+ accreditation on FilmFreeway, a distinction that seemingly offers the festival not just credibility, but also a higher status. I asked Ms. Manolică how they obtained this status, and she answered that the festival simply applied in accordance with the website’s rules, while also mentioning that they process the vast majority of their submissions through this platform. I checked these conditions: they are basically a system through which a festival signs up to offer discounts for filmmakers who have a so-called “Gold” subscription, at no cost for the event itself. According to the description, this accreditation can be obtained “with just a few clicks” – that is, seemingly without being thoroughly vetted by FilmFreeway in regards to the event’s quality. The benefits of this status? A larger number of submissions, the promotion of the festival on the platform’s social media and newsletter, a preferential algorithmic placement on its internal pages, amongst others.

4. The filmmakers’ perspective

In order to look at things also from the standpoint of those who are used to construct this situation, who, up until this point in the article, have only been presented as numbers, I also decided to contact one of the filmmakers whose work was ostensibly showcased at the third edition of the Wallachia Film Festival. Andrew* is one of them, his project featured amongst the 476 films on the website, and is listed as being a “FINALIST”. I contacted him after finding a post of his on a forum in which he was asking when he should expect an answer from the organizers of the festival with regards to his film’s status, after he had been announced shortly before of the fact that his film had been selected. His story is also telling of the festival’s social media strategy.

“Basically, it started on Instagram,” he tells me. “One of their «representatives» sent me a message, saying that I should send my work to Wallachia IFF. I don’t know the reason why they reached out to me – we’re not a big studio – we’re literally independent and non-profit for now, but I do get contacted by others too. I paid a 15$ submission – I had a discount code, if I remember correctly, I believe it was 20% off. That was in May, I believe, and in August they came back over email, where I was notified that my work was selected.”

I asked Andrew whether he ever got any details about the screening of his film or a schedule of the festival, and if they had been made aware that all they might get out of this would be an image file with the festival’s “laurels”. “Well, about that. Never at any point have they mentioned any awards or even screenings, so I thought that it was reserved only for feature films. Basically, what happened is that I sent my work, paid for it, and didn’t get anything from the festival itself, not a single email, nothing. Only from FilmFreeway. They were kind enough to give us a discount, but nothing more than that. And basically, all they did was just change the status from «Official Selection» to «Finalist». No explanation, nothing. We’re still kinda confused. Is it over, will it be anything, like at least a judge’s opinion on our work…”

“I believe they select more than they can handle. I mean, I don’t expect anything besides the laurel to use on the poster, so I can’t really say that I was scammed – but this is our first entry into the film festival world,” Andrew concludes.

5. The final reveal
   

Armed with all of the above, I decided to contact another one of Wallachia Film Festival’s organizers, who is featured as its jury president, and was indicated by Lorena Manolică as being in attendance “at the restaurant” – scriptwriter Tudor Voican, who is also a lecturer at the scriptwriting department of the UNATC “I.L. Caragiale”, Romania’s most important theater and film university. At the same time, he is also featured as the festival’s artistic director on its FilmFreeway page – which would, at least in principle, make him incompatible to serve on its jury. He was the one who, according to Ms. Manolică, was going to show us photos from the event itself. However, from the very outset of our conversation, which I am choosing to reproduce here in full, Mr. Voican’s attitude came across as nervous – but, even so, he did offer the answer that I was looking for throughout this investigation.

FD: I would like to ask you a few questions about de Wallachia Film Festival, where –

TV: Yes, well, you know, we didn’t have a… successful edition this year. So, no… I don’t really wish to communicate.

FD: You don’t want to give any sort of statement?

TV: No, no, no! I don’t, it isn’t… it wasn’t a successful edition that we would be proud of in these conditions… of the pandemic. Because that’s the problem.

FD: But I only have a couple of very short questions. For example, I haven’t managed to find any photos of the event –

TV: He-hey, you see! You’re answering your own questions! So, no, I have nothing to be proud about, I’m sorry.

FD: But still, on your website, there is a list of filmmakers that were granted awards this year. Meaning, there was a process there after all, as far as I can understand.

TV: Yes, yes.

FD: Can you tell me how this process took place?

TV: The process of deliberating?

FD: Yes, the process of awarding these projects.

TV: Well, the jury judged the films.

FD: Who sat on this jury?

TV: (raising his voice) Come on, please, I said no, I don’t want to communicate anything, this is not the time!

FD: I understand. If you can at least offer us a “yes” or “no” answer to the following question – were any of the films included in the festival screened in public?

TV: No, no, no, they weren’t.

6. Some conclusions

In the end, I finally managed to obtain a statement that confirmed the suspicion that I had all along – the third edition of the Wallachia Film Festival did not exist. Whether or not the pandemic had a role to play in this state of affairs cannot be independently confirmed, at least not from the data that we have currently gathered – but what I can certainly say is that the festival has not communicated in any single way whether it did indeed present these films to an audience or not (which, after all, is the primordial mission of any film festival), and cannot confirm that it did so in any manner, either. More so, it is the organisers’ responsibility to openly communicate about this with its over 400 selected filmmakers and especially with the audience, and also to render its organisation and its functioning more transparent. In the end, such practices do little more than to deeply hurt the festival ecosystem and the emerging industry, while simultaneously disenchanting the young filmmakers who wish to practice their crafts within it.

In the series’ next material, we will discuss another problematic festival, this time around, one that was funded by the Romanian Film Center (CNC) – the Cor Ardens festival, whose first edition took place between the 12th and 15th of July 2021 in… the Romanian Palace of the Parliament, and was organized by an agency that took care of the public relations of two major political candidacies in 1996: that of ex-Prime Minister Adrian Năstase’s run for the Mayorship of Bucharest (who has meanwhile been convicted of corruption charges), and ex-president Ion Iliescu’s failed bid in that year’s presidential election.

* The person’s name was changed in order to protect their privacy.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.