Meet Rebekah Louisa Smith | Film Festival Strategist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Rebekah Louisa Smith and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Rebekah Louisa, we’d love to hear about how you approach risk and risk-taking
Risk taking has played such an important part in my life and I encourage everyone to face the fear, trust your gut instinct and do it. Before I started my own business I was scared to take risks as I was worried that I would lose everything such as my home, money and pride but it was in fact my business which helped me to grow as a person and not keep thinking small.

My business is very niche and there are not many people who do what I do – I am a Film Festival Strategist and create strategies for filmmakers to help them get their films seen on the festival circuit. I was one of the first people to launch this back in 2010 before it became more well known. At the time it was something that filmmakers wanted but no-one was really doing it and no one was running it as a full time business. This was my challenge as there was going to be a lot of learning on the job in order to carve out a niche in the industry.

The first thing I had to do was leave the small town of Wales where I was living at the time when this idea was planted and move to London – the capital city of the United Kingdom and the heart of the film industry. There was no way that I could grow my brand, make important connections and contacts and build my business in this lovely but sleepy town in Wales which had no film industry.

London was 10 times more expensive than Wales and it was going to be a big lifestyle change and it wasn’t going to be easy as my finances were going to be tight however I knew I had to do it otherwise I would have been stuck. My family were not in favor of it as they said it would fail but I had already made a commitment to doing it and I wasn’t going to change my mind.

Thank god I did take this risk as if I didn’t I wouldn’t have the established thriving brand which is now well known within the UK film industry.

I’ve now moved from the UK to Texas and this risk felt a lot less stressful as I knew I could do move my brand over here as this time I knew exactly how to do it.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
A lot of people don’t know what it is that I do when I tell them. And the reason why is because a Film Festival Strategist is a very niche part of the film industry but it is an essential part of the film distribution industry. I always tell filmmakers that the golden rule is that you must always create a festival strategy before you submit your film to festivals.

My mission is to help filmmakers get their films seen in festivals around the world so they can gain visibility, win awards and create more opportunities for their careers. The main problem that my clients tend to have is that they don’t know which festivals to submit their film to and need a strategy to be created. I also help them to refine their goals and streamline their budgets so that they are clear on what they want to achieve and have enough funds to do all that they want.

I love creating a festival strategy for a film – I adore putting together a selection of festivals who would be most interested in the film and also identifying which festivals would not be interested in the film. This is what I call the art of streamlining and focusing the strategy and really homing in on the essential festivals to submit to, in order to give the client the highest chances of success.

I also put together plan A, plan B & plan C as the festival world is unpredictable and very tough so it’s important to have plenty of other options on the table in order to achieve get selected for festivals.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I would love to show my best friend around the wonderful city of Dallas.

The first thing we would do which would take a couple of days would be to explore inside out my neighbourhood Bishop Arts. I LOVE living here and each nigh we would go to a different restaurant for dinner, the restaurants would include Paradiso, Written By The Seasons, Tribal, Casablanca (where we could do some dancing afterwards), Kiro, Stock and Barrell and Lucia. Each night we would have a coffee at the Wild Detectives which is a home from home. During the day we would go shopping and stock up on some plants at the Oasis Plant Shop and get our nails done and D&J Nails.

I’d take her shopping for the day at the Northpark Mall and have dinner at Terra in Eataly and then finish watching a film at the AMC Theatre.

After exploring every part of Bishop Arts the remaining part of the week would be exploring Uptown and Downtown Dallas and I’d be sure that we caught a show at the American Airlines Centre

On the final few days I’d take her to explore the hidden gems in Fort Worth – Downtown Fort Worth has such good night life and I am a big fan of King Tut – delicious plant based food!

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Firstly I would like to thank all of my friends and family who support me and continue to support me. This means the world.

There are several people who I would like to thank for helping me get my business into shape and who help build the infrastructure that it needed which is the wonderful Ed J C Smith & Gerlanda Milioto – they are gorgeous souls who gave me a very generous amount of their time to help me figure out how to run my business and present different packages to my clients and other pricing options that would work within my clients budgets.

I also would like to thank Nand Harjani, Ellen Watts, Marie Diamond and Phil McCauley for helping me learn how to bring into my business infrastructure spiritual techniques (including cosmic ordering, manifestation & vision boards) so I could visualise and manifest what I want my business to achieve.

Website: https://www.thefilmfestivaldoctor.com/

Instagram: @rebekahfilmdr

Linkedin: rebekahfilmdr

Twitter: rebekahfilmdr

Facebook: Rebekah Louisa Smith

Youtube: rebekahfilmdr