Film Festival Scam? AIFF is NOT AIFF

[UPDATE March 21, 2010:  Last week I received a letter from the Alaska International Film Festival's attorney saying I had libeled them in this post.  This is my attorney's letter in response.]

[UPDATE August 19, 2010:  I've added a three post series Part 1:  What is a Scam?  Part 2:  What is a Film Festival?
Part 3:  Comparing the Anchorage and Alaska IFFs.]

[UPDATE July 20, 2011: I've added this post documenting that the Alaska International Film Awards was two days past its award announcement date.  It's five days late now.

While working on the ANCHORAGE International Film Festival blog posts I came across another website that had me totally baffled for a bit.  (I added the black circle) The picture was great, but just totally different in style and content from the Anchorage International Film Festival.  Did they add some new graphics? I clicked around and  I couldn't find any of the content that was on the AIFF website.

The awards page had great verbiage like,

"highlight Alaska's important role in the international film community."

What important role do we have in the film world?  Most films about Alaska are done somewhere warmer and cheaper.  And  

"In addition, Best of Category awards will be presented in each main competitive category and Special Jury Awards are presented to filmmakers who make significant contributions to social change, environmental awareness, and humanitarian causes."

but then I got to this:

The Alaska International Film Festival is an awards-based film and screenplay competition.  Films will not be screened for the public.  Awards will be announced publicly by Internet and international press release.

 "Will not be screened for the public." ?!!  I thought a key part about entering a festival was to get an audience for your film.  Winners announced by internet?  Who is on the jury?  And how come I couldn't find anybody's name on the website?  Is the whole festival computer generated?   And then I saw.  It wasn't the ANCHORAGE International Film Festival.    It was the ALASKA film festival. (No, I'm not offering a link to the site.)

Here's the website for the festival I've been blogging about.

But on the OTHER AIFF site,
the submission page lists the different categories and it costs $25 or  $40 to submit a film depending on length and how early you submit your film.

And there's a contact address where you can also submit your films: 

For general questions or filmmaker inquiries please contact us at:

Alaska International Film Festival
3705 Arctic Blvd, Suite 2329
Anchorage, AK 99503

So I checked out the address today when I was doing other errands.

Above is 3705 Arctic in Anchorage.  The address is in white letters above the door under the red Mail Cache letters.  If you double click the picture you can enlarge it to see.

If you wander  past lots of mailboxes you get to this alcove (left) and  "Suite 2329" is down on the end wall, lower right.  It's a very small suite.

Right here in the picture on the right to be precise.


A whosis search of the url for this website got me to Godaddy and yielded a phone number with a 270 area code.  That's in Kentucky.  A long ways away from Alaska.

This is pretty suspicious.  So when I finished all of the above, I googled "film festival scams" and on the third site I checked I found this article on film festival scams that identifies the Alaska International Film Festival as a likely scam:

Sunday, 4 October 2009

Beware of scam 'film festivals'

By Benjamin Craig

It seems that every man and his dog wants to run a film festival these days, which is fantastic in many ways, not least because it provides an even greater number of outlets for filmmakers to get their work in front of an audience. Sadly the multitude of scammers who prowl the Internet also seem to have their dirty fingers in the film festival scene as well.

A timely reminder came this week when the "Alaska International Film Festival" was brought to our attention. Visit the site - www.alaskafilmfestival.com (not hyperlinked so as not to give undue Google link mojo to this site) - and on the surface you see a clean, professional looking site for what sounds like a prestigious event and is fact described as such by the site content. But before you dive into the submissions area, it's worth noting a few red flags...

Firstly, the site content reads like this event has been around for years, and indeed, the About Us page says as much. But on closer examination, there is nothing to indicate any previous years' activities, nor can you find any mention of it in Google. Indeed, when we contacted the 'festival' to ask for a list of last year's winners, the respondent told us that this was in fact their inaugural year, despite the About Us page saying, "Each year, awards are presented to independent filmmakers from around the globe..." Update 10-Oct-2009 - surprise surprise, the copy on the About Us page has been changed slightly after this article was published. . .  [Emphasis added]

 You can read the rest of this post and learn about more red flags at filmmaking.com. 

[UPDATE August 9, 2012:  Le site d'Irna, in a post called Pseudo Festivals, Pseudo Awards   writes, in part:  [There's also a French version]

"Let’s start by taking a look at some of these sites: 
California Film Awards 
Alaska International Film Awards 
Oregon Film Awards 
Colorado Film Festival 
Mountain Film Awards 
Honolulu Film Awards 
Yosemite Film Festival ... [I've removed the links]
Doesn’t it strike you that there is more than a little family resemblance between the sites of these different ‘festivals’?  And you wouldn’t be wrong: all these festivals and their ‘prestigious awards’ have more in common than a mere similarity of template design.
  the jury that awards the ‘rewards’ is never identified, making it impossible to find out who its members are; 
  none of these ‘festivals’ ever organizes any public screenings; 
  while posing as established festivals (“Each year, the Yosemite Film Festival recognizes excellence in filmmaking”, “The Oregon Film Awards® are presented each year in several categories” ...), none of them has been running for longer than a year or two; 
  all of them hand out a very large number of awards with grandiloquent names: ‘Grand Jury Award’, ‘Northern Lights Emerging Talent Award’, ‘Sierra Nevada Awards’, ‘Silver Sierra Awards’, ‘Gold Kahuna Awards’, ‘Diamond’, ‘Platinum’, ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’ ... Awards; 
  the addresses associated with the domain names all seem to consist solely of Post Office boxes; 
  all these sites are hosted by Rackspace Hosting, either in San Antonio or Chicago ..."]

If you want to submit a film to a festival in Alaska, I recommend the Anchorage International Film Festival.  I know it's real because I've been to a number of them and I blogged the last two.