If selected, your film will be screened to a live audience in Tokyo, giving you an incredible opportunity for international exposure!
Please Note: We used to have 4 rounds of judging prior to our Tokyo screening then we switched to 2 but now we've changed to a completely traditional festival format so we won't be doing awards before our screening (so no announcements or results before our Nov event), we won't have any different rounds, and although less films will be selected now like most other festivals, all official selections will screen in Tokyo. Only the official selections will then be eligible for our awards that will be announced after our yearly screening. We used to be partnered with the Bloodstained Indie Film Festival for this as noted before but that is no longer the case so we're both separate now. The screenings of several years ago took place in Shanghai but we changed to Japan a while back.
Web series are welcome and can be submitted under shorts. If we receive enough high quality web series entries, we will have a Best Web Series award, and we may have separate web series genre awards depending on the number of entries. Animated genre films are welcome too and can be submitted under the appropriate category like Horror Short or Sci-Fi Short, etc. If your film fits more than one genre like if it's both Horror and Sci-Fi, you can pick the category you feel is most appropriate but don't worry since we can move it to a different category if necessary. We're not that picky and obviously some films are a blend of different genres but we love to see those too.
Judging Process: Once a film wins a particular category, we don't list it again under nominees in the same category it already won (we felt this was redundant), but of course, a film cannot win without first being nominated by our judges behind the scenes. But in our process, after a film wins a specific category, it changes from nominee to winner in that category so that's why we don't list it again.