DOC SCREENINGS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL

WHO THIS IS FOR

Documentaries are the films people spend years on and then show to almost nobody. The circuit is crowded, the big festivals programme around themes and timing as much as around the work, and a rejection tells you nothing about whether the film holds an audience for its full running time, which, for a documentary, is the whole question.

Doc Screenings puts your film in front of a room in Tbilisi and on our Festival Channel online the same night, and asks people who came to watch rather than to assess. Where their attention went, what stayed with them, and what they would have wanted more or less of.

We take documentary in any form and any length: feature, short, essay, portrait, investigative, observational, travel, historical, cultural, personal. AI-assisted work is accepted, with the sourcing stated.

WHAT YOU GET

If your project is selected

✅ A screening in front of a live audience in Tbilisi and on our Festival Channel, the same night

✅ Structured audience feedback: recommendation score, component ratings, written responses

✅ A written jury statement on the work itself, not a template

✅ Official Selection laurels and certificate

✅ A project page on our site with your poster, stills, trailer and the audience reviews

✅ A full Audience Feedback Report, free in exchange for a FilmFreeway review

✅ Announcement across our channels

If it is not selected

✅ An LSN Reviewer Note: a brief expert read on the work and where it sits

That last one is the part most festivals skip. You paid an entry fee and got a form email. We would rather tell you something.

HOW THE SCREENING WORKS

Films are shown one after another on the festival days, in a room with actual people in it.

Viewers answer three questions on every film: would you recommend it, how would you rate it, and what did and didn't work for you. The same model runs on the Festival Channel online, where the work is available to a verified audience for the duration.

Those two streams produce two separate awards, Festival Winner from the live room, Channel

Audience Choice from the online vote, alongside the jury's own nomination awards.

If nobody watched a project, it gets no audience data, and we say so.

WHY A FESTIVAL IS ATTACHED TO A MARKET

LSN is not only a festival. We run a distribution and representation arm that takes finished films and screenplays to buyers and producers, and we have been reading independent work since 2015: over 5,000 projects from 159 countries.

Documentary has more buyers than most filmmakers realise and fewer of the kind they expect. Broadcast strands, cultural and educational licensing, institutional and library placement, in-flight programming, thematic platforms: most of it licences rather than acquires, most of it pays modestly, and a good deal of it pays reliably for years. Runtime, language and rights clearance decide access to those channels more often than quality does.

That is the frame the jury statement is written in, and it is why we flag structural problems: an unstable runtime, unsecured archive or music, when we see them rather than after they have closed a door.

We do not guarantee that anything follows from it. Most projects are here for the screening and the feedback, and that is a complete reason to submit.