Nominees Announced for the 1st Ever Festival Genius Audience Award

Last night, at the Alfred Dunhill store in New York City, actor Oliver Platt (The Big C, Please Give) took the stage to announce the nominees for the first ever FESTIVAL GENIUS AUDIENCE AWARD. The award, presented by IFP and Slated (Owner of Festival Genius) will be given out on November 29^th at the 20th Anniversary Gothams Independent Film Awards.

The Festival Genius Audience Award celebrates this year’s audience award winners from across the top 50 US and Canadian film festivals. True to the democratic spirit of the independent film community, all nominees were determined through online voting. Over 12,000 votes came in to narrow the initial list of twenty-six films down to five. Those nominees are:

Winter’s Bone, directed by Debra Granik, also nominated for three other Gotham Awards including Best Feature, Best Ensemble and Breakthrough Actor for Jennifer Lawrence. Winter’s Bone won the audience award for feature film at the 2010 San Francisco and Traverse City Film Festivals.

Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which won the audience award for documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

White Irish Drinkers, directed by John Gray, which won the audience award for feature film at the 2010 Woodstock Film Festival.

9000 Needles, directed by Doug Dearth, which won the audience award for best documentary at the 2010 Phoenix Film Festival.

Brotherhood, directed by Will Canon, which won the audience award for best feature at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW).

Voting to select the final winner starts today at http://gothamawards.slated.com, and will end on November 29th at 5 pm EST. One lucky voter will win a night’s stay at the Andaz Wall Street in New York City plus two tickets to the Gotham Awards.

As the first major award show of the film season, the Gotham Independent Film Awards provides critical early recognition and media attention to worthy independent films. This new award will be presented alongside other competitive categories including: Best Feature, Best Documentary, Breakthrough Director, Breakthrough Actor, Best Ensemble Performance and Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. This year, actors Robert Duvall and Hilary Swank, director Darren Aronofsky and Focus Features CEO, James Schamus, will each be presented with career tributes.

Check out http://gothams.ifp.org for a full list of nominees, and don’t forget to visit http://gothamawards.slated.com to vote. Then, tune to http://www.ifp.org on the evening of November 29^th to live-stream the entire award show.

We’ll see you there!

B-Side Finds its New Home at IFP

In huge news for filmmakers and festivals around the world, IFP, in conjunction with New York-based company Slated, announced today that B-Side’s Festival Genius™ technology and database has found a new home. Slated has acquired all of recently shuttered B-Side’s intellectual property, and effective immediately has licensed the B-Side Festival Genius to IFP. Senior Executives from B-Side including founder Chris Hyams have joined Slated, while key members of B-Side’s festival team are joining IFP. The move will transform IFP, exponentially expanding its potential membership base and the organization’s ability to build audiences for independent films, and help individual filmmakers identify, build and connect with those audiences. Slated will take over B-Side’s business of providing market research services to independent film producers and distributors and will roll out new products and services later this year.

Festival Genius provides critical infrastructure to support film festivals and independent filmmakers and promote voices that might not otherwise be heard. Over the past four years, B-Side’s Festival Genius hosted online program guides for over 200 international film festivals, capturing audience feedback on 40,000 feature films from over 3 million annual visitors and building a registered membership of 200,000 film fans. IFP will now take over the running of these online film festival program guides and plans to significantly expand the reach of Festival Genius while keeping costs to the festivals nominal. IFP will continue B-Side’s past practice of sharing Festival Genius audience data with festivals and will soon start sharing data with IFP member filmmakers, offering them a direct line to audience feedback.

Several B-Side festival partners, including Sundance Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, Austin Film Festival, Independent Film Festival of Boston, Newport Beach Film Festival, Phoenix Film Festival, and NewFest: The NYC LGBT Film Festival have already committed to use Festival Genius again this year in its new incarnation.

Notes Joseph Beyer, Associate Director Sundance Institute Online, “Thanks to B-Side, the 2010 Sundance Film Festival program’s film guide was widely and universally recognized as the best in the history of the event. We are absolutely thrilled to see the Festival Genius and B-Side team find a new home, and are looking forward to an even better film guide for 2011.”

Notes Joana Vicente, IFP’s Executive Director: “This is a game changer for IFP and our mission. Festival Genius is an essential service for the independent film-making community – for festivals, film-lovers and filmmakers. IFP has always been the place where filmmakers, the film industry and audiences intersect. This partnership is an exciting step forward in our mission, in that it literally places IFP where audiences interact with filmmakers on the web. We now have the potential to reach all of Festival Genius’s 200,000 film fans worldwide. These fans will be offered a one-year free IFP membership and we will host a network of sites that is in contact with 3 million independent filmgoers a year. We are confident this is a tremendous growth opportunity for IFP and that we are uniquely situated to expand the potential of the Festival Genius platform.”