ART EXPERIMENTAL SCREENINGS FILM FESTIVAL FRESH STREAM

WHO THIS IS FOR

Experimental and art cinema has a specific problem: the festivals that take it are curator-driven, and the verdict arrives as a yes or a no with nothing attached. You never find out what an audience made of it, because an audience never saw it.

Fresh Stream is the other way round. Your work screens for a real room in Tbilisi and on our Festival Channel online, the viewers fill in structured forms while they watch, and you get what they wrote.

We take experimental, art, avant-garde, essay film, video art, hybrid and non-narrative work, features, shorts and screenplays. AI-driven work is accepted and always has been.

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.

That changes what a selection here is worth. The jury statement is written by people who spend the rest of their week pitching work to buyers, and the audience data is the kind of proof a buyer will actually look at.

It also means that when a project screens well and has somewhere to go commercially, we notice, and we say so. 

Some of the films in our distribution catalogue came in through these festivals.

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

SCREENPLAY CONTEST

Fresh Stream includes a screenplay contest for experimental and art-driven scripts.

Selected scripts get an excerpt published on the contest page: five to ten pages, or roughly ten percent, never the full text without your permission, alongside a Festival Opinion written by our team on the script and its potential. 

Readers download, read and vote using the same model as the films.

That vote produces the Readers' Choice Award.