Circkit

AI-powered film festival strategy for indie filmmakers

Movies

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Hi Product Hunt, I'm Dylan Gillah, founder of Circkit. Circkit is an AI-powered film festival strategist that helps indie filmmakers pick the festivals that fit their film, protect their world premiere, and qualify for BAFTA and the Oscars. I built it because I kept making expensive mistakes running my own films through the circuit. The problem: FilmFreeway is a great place to submit, but it's only a checkout. There's no strategy layer, so filmmakers are told to "submit widely," which is the most expensive advice in independent film. You spray submission fees at festivals that were never a fit, and worse, you can burn your world premiere by accident. A premiere is a one-time resource. Screen at the wrong festival first and the top tier closes for good. Not because the film wasn't strong enough, but because of the order you submitted in. Circkit is the strategy layer above all of that, and the FilmFreeway alternative I wanted for the planning side. It scores 1,800+ festivals from its own film festival database against your specific film, tracks your premiere in real time and stops you before you burn it, and gives you real festival programmer intelligence: programmer taste, jury history, and three years of selection patterns, so you walk in knowing the room. It also tracks BAFTA and Oscar qualifying festivals in plain English, because most filmmakers get those conditions wrong. A note on why you can trust the data. I'm an NFTS producing graduate and a 2024 BBC Film Scholar, and my films have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, BFI Flare, Raindance and Reeling. Circkit is the festival strategy I ran on my own campaigns, turned into software. The thing that changed most while building it was pricing. I assumed a subscription, then realised filmmakers budget by the film, not by the month, and most of the year is the gap between films. Charging for those gaps felt backwards. So Circkit is pay once, per film. Nothing renews, nothing to cancel, and the strategy keeps recalibrating across the whole campaign. Your first film is free, no card, because the product should earn the price, not gate the door. If you're running a short or a first feature this year, add it and tell me what you think. And if you're a builder rather than a filmmaker, I'd value your read on the product itself. Thanks for taking a look.