Comparing the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA International Film Festivals - Real Festival? Scam?

This is the final post of  three part series of posts.  The first two parts were:

Part 1:  What's a Scam?
Part 2:  What's a Film Festival?

This post is Part 3:  Comparison of Authenticity of ANCHORAGE and ALASKA International Film Festivals.

This is a long post. To make it a little easier, here are the key sections. The links will take you to that section.


Overview
Some Background
Comparing the  authenticity of the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFFs.

• Question 1 Is it really a film festival? 
• I contacted some of the 2010 Winners
• Interesting Development
• Question 2 Is it really a scam?
• The 9 elements of Oregon fraud 

Conclusion


Overview

In 2009, there were two film festivals in Alaska with the same ACRONYM - AIFF. One A stands for Anchorage. Think of the ANCHOR of a boat. Something that keeps the boat secure and safe. The ANCHORage International Film Festival began in 2001 and is a winter celebration of film and film people with people coming from around the world.

The other Alaska. Think of ALAS! the word of woe when something is wrong. This festival began last year, though the original website made it sound like it had been around for years, and there actually is no festival. People send in films and money and they announce their winners in July. In fact, this year in July, after the awards announcement, they changed their name from Festival to Awards (Alaska International Film Awards.)

This post compares the two film events against standards for a film festival and against standards for a scam. Actually, I've used standards for fraud.

Some Background

This all began last November when I was preparing to blog the ANCHORAGE IFF and accidentally got onto a website that puzzled me because all the pictures were different.  I couldn't imagine  they would make such a radical change to their website a week or so before the festival.  And then I saw it.  This said ALASKA, not ANCHORAGE.  I ended up writing a post:  Film Festival Scam?  AIFF is NOT AIFF.

In March of this year I received a letter from the ALASKA IFF threatening me with a law suit if I didn't remove the post.  My attorney responded with a letter back.  They never responded.  But I've been poking around since then and discovered that there is a dark side to the film festival circuit.  These posts are intended to alert film makers to be careful when choosing festivals. 


Comparing the  authenticity of the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFFs.


There are two basic questions to ask:
1.  Is it really a film festival?
2.  Is it a scam?

To answer Question 1 Is it really a film festival?  I've pulled out the elements of a film festival that I put together in the post on What is a Film Festival?  and put them into this table to compare the ANCHORAGE and ALASKA IFF.

Characteristics of Film Festival	ANCHORAGE  IFF	ALASKA   IFF 2010
Gathering of people	YES	NO
Show and watch films	YES	NO
Get an audience for filmmakers	YES	NO
Let the public and critics see a wide variety of new films	YES	NO
Opportunities for the participants to meet, discuss the films, filmmaking, and distribution of the films.	YES	NO
A networking opportunity	YES	NO
Festival gives awards	YES	YES
Festival, not award winners, pays for awards	YES	NO

I contacted some of the 2010 Winners

You can see that the only film festival-like characteristic of the ALASKA IFF this year was to give out awards.   When they posted the winners on July 15 I contacted about four of them.  I told them I was a blogger who covered the ANCHORAGE IFF and that since there was no actual showing of films or gathering people for the ALASKA IFF, could they tell me what they got for their awards.  They all replied that they got a nice certificate and the right to BUY a "crystal wave" award for prices ranging from $155 to $250.

When I was researching these posts, I didn't see too much that discussed awards, but in a book called Film Festivals Secrets by Christopher Holland, there's a short section on scams (p. 19) where he mentions having to buy the awards.

So, the  only criterion the ALASKA IFF for 2010 met was the award, but the winners have to pay for their own awards.   The ALASKA IFF clearly is not what most people would consider a  legitimate film festival.

On the other hand the ANCHORAGE IFF met all the criteria of a legitimate film festival.


Interesting Development

I would note that in the time since I wrote the first two parts of this series, the ALASKA International Film Festival has renamed itself to the ALASKA International Film AWARDS.  Festival is gone.  Well, not completely.  Their web address still (as I write this) includes filmfestival.


That does change things a bit.  If it doesn't have FESTIVAL in its name, at least film makers should be alerted to some extent that there might not be a festival involved.  No showing of films.  No networking. No meeting other filmmakers, no parties, etc.




Question 2:  Is it really a scam?

Does changing the name from festival to awards mean this is all moot?  Not exactly.  Scam doesn't necessarily mean illegal, but it does mean there is some deception involved, some attempt to appear to be something that it is not.  There are still some questions about the awards, about the use of the name Alaska, and the overall transparency of the organization.   

Finding clear criteria for a scam isn't all that easy, so I've decided to take the more stringent criteria of Oregon fraud as listed on Fraudlaw.com.  We can go through them one by one.

The 9 elements of Oregon fraud are:

1)  A representation

ANCHORAGE International Film FESTIVAL - represents itself as a film festival in Anchorage, Alaska.  It has had festivals since 2001, in Anchorage, showing films, supported by local sponsors and many volunteers.  It has an Alaska business license, and the names of the board of directors are available on their website.  They have local addresses, emails, and phone numbers.  

Alaska International Film Awards - represents itself  (as of July 2010) not as a  film festival, but as Film Awards. This is their first year - first month as I write - as the Alaska International Film Awards. 

2) Its falsity;

Anchorage International Film Festival - I've found nothing false about anything the AIFF website says.  And therefore the next criteria will only consider the Alaska International Film Awards. 

Alaska International Film Awards -  Much of the text is similar to what was up when this was the Film Festival.  (I would note, that even then, it did state on one of its pages that there was no actual showing of films.)  They still have the same mailing address:

Alaska International Film Awards
3705 Arctic Blvd. #2329
Anchorage, AK 99503


As I showed in my original post on this, this is simply a private mail service box. The Mail Cache is a private company that rents mail boxes and forwards mail. There is no need for anyone related to the Alaska International Film Awards to even be in Alaska because the Mail Cache advertises that:

Our unique computerized system allows for almost any forwarding contingency possible.

For example, if you needed all your first class mail only, sent once every week to Australia,  and all your magazines every other month to New York City, we can do it!

 I cannot find a business license for the Alaska International Film Awards (or Festival) on the Alaska Corporations, Business and Professional Licensing website.

Their phone number on their Withoutabox listing has a Kentucky area code (270-675-0451)

Their two sponsors (they had no sponsors when they first posted and we pointed that out) are listed as ViewConference whose address is:

• info@viewconference.it
• Corso Marconi, 38
• 10125 Turin
• Italy

and Indie Media Entertainment (IME) which is located in California:

Mailing Address:
15 Hammond Suite #302
Irvine, CA 92618

3) Its materiality -

 Does it matter that the Awards organization is not in Alaska?

They have represented themselves as Alaskan, with Alaska in their name, with pictures of what appears to be Alaska wilderness on their webiste, and even some Alaska theme names among their Awards - Kodiak Award, Denali Award, Northern Lights Emerging Talent Award, and Best of Alaska Award. Obviously, they want people to think they are connected to Alaska.

If not, why would they do all this Alaska imagery and why not have people mail things directly to them instead of via a rented Alaska mailbox?

Why not call it by some other name, like "The Fantastic Film Awards" or "The International Film Awards"?  Why put Alaska in front?

Because, I would guess,

• Most film festivals have the location of the festival in the title and they have an actual festival in that location.  Without a location, people might check a little harder. This Awards thing called itself a film festival in its first year.  This blog and filmmaker.net called it out as not really being a festival.  Now they've changed their name to Awards.  But they've kept the Alaska name, a place most people know about, but have never been to and don't know much about. A place to which most people aren't likely to know the Awards have no real connections.
  
• Film makers would be confused. The original name had its acronym identical to an existing film festival in Alaska - the Anchorage International Film Festival with the same AIFF.  Even people in Alaska have gotten confused between the two names.  One might argue this is completely coincidental.  But it certainly sets up some confusion for film makers who aren't familiar with Alaska, and even people who are.  Award winners from this year that I've communicated with were clearly confused.
  
  
• Alaska's name and mystique sells.  

For all these reasons, they are more likely to be noticed and get submissions than if they had a name without a place in it, or even if they had some less romantic and less distant place than Alaska.  

Presumably, the existing ANCHORAGE IFF lost submissions because people confused the two festivals. 

As long as this Awards thing keeps Alaska in the name, it makes people believe that there is a connection to Alaska - even the names of the main awards have Alaska themes.  From their current website:

Awards will be presented in several categories including three main recognition levels: the Kodiak Award, the Denali Award, and the Northern Lights Emerging Talent Award.  

4) The speaker's knowledge of the representation's falsity or ignorance of its truth;

Clearly, the sponsors are well aware that 

• they have no connection to Alaska beyond the name of their Awards thing and a rented mail box. They know there is an Anchorage International Film Festival with the same acronym they originally chose.  
• they aren't a festival - and at least they had the decency to change their name from festival to award. But I suspect if bloggers - at least three of whom got threatening letters from their attorney for pointing this out - hadn't written about this, it would still be called a festival this year. 
• film makers aren't likely to know the above two facts.  Holland, in his book, Film Festival Secrets writes:

". . . and filmmakers are too focused on completing their films,  to pay much attention to how films get into festivals afterward" (p. 13)

Additionally, there is lots of missing information.

• There are no names of real people on the original website or the newly named Awards website.
• The process for judging films is not listed, nor are names of anyone involved in judging films.
• The winners of the first year are posted, but the other films submitted are not.  At actual festivals, they have to post the names of all the accepted films so viewers can know when and where to watch them.  This means there is no way to confirm that they only award a maximum of 15% of the films submitted.  [There's actually nothing to confirm here.  Even I, as carefully as I've gone through this, misinterpreted this.  It actually says 'more than 15%.'  But in my mind I couldn't imagine them saying this and so I misread it.]
• There is no information posted that the award winners must purchase their trophies.

5) Intent that the representation be acted on in a manner reasonably contemplated;

Obviously, they wanted film makers to send application fees to them. I don't know if they care about getting the dvd's of the films. I have no idea what they do with them, but if they didn't ask for them, how could they choose award winners. And from my calculation**, based on their representations, they probably made  [somewhere between] about [$2600 and] $16,000, minus the cost of the rented mail box ($10/month according to the mail cache website, though since they had one of the bigger ones, it might have been more) plus the postage to have everything forwarded.  If they're lucky, most people use Withoutabox and they don't have to pay for the postage.  And they don't have to pay for awards either, in fact, it's possible they get a cut from those too. 

6) The hearer's ignorance of the falsity of the representation;

Filmmakers have a responsibility to check out the festivals they submit to.  If they had read the Alaska IFF website carefully,

• they would have found out there was no actual showing of films, but 
• they wouldn't know there was no real connection to Alaska.  If they had spent some time googling, they might have found warnings. (when I google, the filmmaking.net story comes up on the first page and this blog's story comes on page 2)
• they also wouldn't have found out that winners had to pay for their own awards. 

There are festivals which exist like vanity press - people pay their money and get their award which they can use to impress people who don't know anything about the obscure festival.   

If someone knows that they are paying for an award, that may be a little seedy, but then the deal between the Awards thing and the film maker is transparent and everyone knows what the deal is.  But this organization advertises that

Awards will be presented to more than 15% of total applicants and only to those films that demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality. 

So this doesn't appear to be a vanity festival where all submissions win (and I have no reason to believe that is what happened, though the three Alaska themed awards had ten winners each) or where the winners would be expected to pay for their trophies as the winners I contacted were asked to do.

7) The hearer's reliance on its (the representation in item 1) truth;

The overwhelming number of festivals are legitimate.  In his book Film Festival Secrets, William Holland writes that "Fortunately, these [scams] are few and far between, but festival scams do exist."(p. 19)  I imagine that scams will increase as people begin to realize the amount of money to be made with a rented mailbox.

I'm guessing that many filmmakers, totally caught up in the time devouring activities of completing a film, do not pay near as much attention to getting in film festivals as they should.

There are many film related websites and blogs where people might learn about the reputations of various film festivals.

I have learned though my experiences just writing about film festivals is that:
1.  There doesn't seem to be any sort of vetting or regulation of film festivals.  I haven't found a governing body that verifies the legitimacy of festivals.
2.  Withoutabox, an organizations that streamlines submitting to film festivals, for many appears to be taken as a seal of approval.  But it also appears that because there are so many new film festivals daily and because they profit from people submitting to festivals - legit or not - they are not checking out festivals for legitimacy.

So, while some film makers, perhaps many, might assume being connected with Withoutabox implies legitimacy, this doesn't appear to be the case.  I couldn't find anything on their site that actually talks about Withoutabox and what they claim to actually do other than send people's films out to festivals.  However, they do have forums where people can ask questions about festivals and see what others have had to say. 

8) The hearer's right to rely on the representation;

One has to assume that the hearer has an obligation to read the website carefully.  Since there don't seem to be any governmental agencies or even industry groups that monitor festivals, there aren't a lot of options but to trust what the festival website presents.  Last year when I first discovered this, the only contact mentioned was the Anchorage mailing address.  I went to talk to the people but it turned out to be a rented mail box.  There was no email or phone number.

This year there is an email address.  Withoutabox has a phone number.  So, presumably you could get more information from the people who run this organization.

So, hearers - in this case readers -

• could have read and discovered there was no actual film festival.  And the name has even been changed in July to Awards, which reflects this more.
• could NOT tell there is no connection really with Alaska
• could NOT tell that award winners are expected to pay for their trophies

9) Damage caused by the representation.

• The opportunity costs of sending to a festival that isn't a festival.  Even this year, though, with the name changed to Awards, people will spend time and money submitting to this festival when, if they knew there was no connection to Alaska and they knew they would have to pay for their trophy, they wouldn't have submitted.
  
• The actual costs, somewhere between $30-50 for submission
• Cost to pay Withoutabox if they use them
• Cost of the whatever they submit to the Awards thing 
• Cost of postage

For individual film makers, the cost isn't great - perhaps $100 total at most, not counting their time.  But this is the  typical salami technique where no individual loses a lot but cumulatively the organization can make a considerable amount.  The FBI tends not to go after these things because the individual damage isn't great.

• The Anchorage International Film Festival stands to be the biggest loser.  As a real festival in Alaska with the same initials the Alaska International Film Festival adopted for its first year, a significant portion of the film submissions might have gone to them as film makers mixed the two festivals up.  

Conclusion

I'm only able to use information that is available here.  In a court of law, attorneys could subpoena information and take testimony that I can't get.  Therefore, I can't make any final conclusions.  But this is how I see it with the limited information I have.

The ANCHORAGE International is unquestionably a real festival, with lots of films, lots of viewers, lots of film makers from around the world.  I've seen it with my own eyes.  I've been to four or five of them and blogged three of them, so I know it's real.  It's not perfect.  But each year they learn from their mistakes and get better.  And film makers, including minor film makers, say they get treated very well in Anchorage compared to most other festivals.

The ALASKA International Film Festival/Awards is clearly not a festival, which they acknowledged last month by changing their name from Festival to Awards.  But there are still questions in my mind about their transparency, particularly on the issue of being an "Alaskan" festival and the awards.

• There is nothing Alaska about the Alaska International Awards except the pictures on their website (and some of those are questionable), their rented mail box, and their name.  To portray yourself as something you are not is clearly deceptive and what scams do to get their victims to part with their money.

• They charged their award winners a significant amount for the 'crystal wave' trophies they won.   Christopher Holland, the author of Film Festival Secrets (p. 19) lists this as the practice of film festival scams.
  
• There is no information about any of the organizers, jurors, or any people at all on their website. Most legitimate film competitions list the names of their boards and staff on their websites. 

To be totally open and honest they should

• abandon the name Alaska and take a name that more realistically represents who they are
  
• be more open about the fact that winners must pay for their trophies on the website.  If people want to submit to a vanity awards thing (a festival is a festival but what do you all an awards?), then they should know that is what they are doing.  
  
• list the names  and contact information of the key people involved in their awards event. 

**Calculation of $16,000 income from submission fees.
Their website says 

Awards will be presented to more than 15% of total applicants and only to those films that demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality.

[Update August 20:  I originally misread this and mentally put a 'no' before the "more than."  It would make sense for a film event with awards to limit the number of awards to a relatively small percent, especially since it says the films must "demonstrate a superior level of craftsmanship and quality."  How can they be sure there will be enough submissions that meet that standard?  So the 'no' would have made sense.  But this changes things.  It makes the amount they probably took in lower, but it also takes away any standards.  Reading it correctly means that potentially every film that was submitted could have gotten an award.  I'll adjust the rest accordingly.]
 
Their site lists 65 award winners for film and screenwriting.  That means they had to have at least 406 films submitted.  We have to trust that they kept to the 15% limit, since they don't show films and they didn't list the films submitted, we can't tell for sure.  If there weren't at least 406 films, then they would clearly be deceiving film makers and screen writers.

[We know that 65 films won awards (I think it's a little less because a couple may have won more than one category), so that is the minimum number of films.  So the festival could have had - according to their guidelines - anywhere from 65 films and scripts submitted to about 400 submissions (65 is a bit more than 15% of 400).]

Their fees - depending on length and date submitted - ranged from $30 - $55.  If we assume $40 as an average price in order to make a guestimate, they would have received [between $2600 and $16,000] $16,240 in submission fees.

[But this also means that they are not limiting the number of awards the way I thought and the way a legitimate award event would do it.  Rather,  they are leaving it open for every entry to potentially get an award.  As film makers around the world begin to realize this, the value of winning one of these awards diminishes because all the films could potentially get an award.  If that were the case, it would simply be like buying an award.  Because only the award winners are announced, no one knows what percent of applicants actually won. And it appears that the Alaska International Film Awards takes a cut of the award cost for themselves.]]

[UPDATE Nov 17, 2017:  It's come to my attention that in 2013 IndieWire did a two part post on film festival scams  and talked about the work on this blog, including this post.]