Hi

A quarter of the year is gone, and along with it, the first of our four submission deadlines. 

On the bright side, there's lots to celebrate - including more early selections for #NZWF24.

Enjoy

Team #NZWF24

COME ONE, COME ALL!

Every month until August, we'll roll out a few early selections. Some months we'll theme our choices, by only announcing titles by returning submitters or only titles by first-timers. 

The following selections are chosen from all the submissions we received before our Early Bird deadline on 31 March. 

If your work is not named as an early selection, despair not! All titles submitted to us are in the selection mix until we announce our full programme in September. 

Congrats to all our early selections. There's no more need to bite your nails, and you can now do smugly self-satisfied happy dances,  

Let the drums roll for ...

PODCASTS

Actual Play titles ... Australian Dungeons and Dragons dramedy podcast Portal Quandry and Argentinian  improvised fantasy comedy Re Rol: The Sprout of Fire, one of the winners of Queens Court Games' Crown Grant earlier this year.

Non-fiction titles LTAR, a roundtable discussion about the role race plays in America, and Still...?!, about the challenges females face in the entertainment industry. 

Fiction podcasts drama How it Ends, whose story traverses grief, dreams, secrets, memory, and mystery, and sci-fi tale The Flight of the Bucket.

SHORTS

lissalee's mixed media animated music video for Kimberley Fenton’s Deliverance - our first MV selected for 2024,

Two Non-Fiction shorts - Iacopo Patierno's exploration of Sicilian history in The Landing and Milli Gillard's conservation-themed Tōku Waiata / My Song 

And two Fiction shorts, Tyler Redmond's coming-of-age drama Dive and Last Night in Seoul from Yoh Komaya, who's also behind series Like in Movies.  

SERIES

The second season of Navid Bahadori's Australian animated series The Twist (above), of which we were happy to have the first series back in 2019.

Two factual series, one of which we've also seen before. Season four of Charlie David's Canadian show Drag Heals, which also played last year's festival. The new arrival is a local, Belle Gwilliam's DoC series Fiordland Kiwi Diaries.

We've chosen three fiction series, two of which have played NZ Web Fest before. Last year local show Well Well Wellness was selected as a pilot. This year we have the first season. Season two of Leon Cheo's Singaporean series People Like Us played the festival in 2019, and we're happy to have the third season in the mix this year. We're also happy to have Anthony Coveney's Earth Calling Matilda, one of three Canadian series off to France to compete at CanneSeries next week.

Congratulations to the teams behind all those titles.

Our 2024 selections page is here. We'll keep adding the early selections as they're announced from now until September, so you can keep up to date with what's in (so far). 

Come April, we'll announce some more early selections, chosen from all the submissions received before our Early Bird deadline. Throw your hat, podcast, short film or web series in the ring at filmfreeway.com/nzwebfest

Good luck!

OUT & ABOUT

We're always happy to share news of success for shows we've enjoyed sharing with audiences here, and March was a busy month for announcements. 

The Screen Producers Australia conference, Screen Forever, ran recently and handed out the SPA awards. Picking up the Online Series Production of the Year award was Touch The Sky, a finalist with us last year. It won in a field that also included another of our 2023 finalists, #VANLIFE (EMOTIONAL).

LA (2-3 May) has also named its selections, with 11 podcasts and 12 series from our 2023 programme in  the line-up. Congrats to all the selections and, again, a shout-out to a local winner at #NZWF23, now in the LA mix, Blind Bitter Happiness.

Miami (2-5 May) has named its line-up - two year's worth of titles following the weather-forced cancellation of the festival's 2023 edition. A whopping 32 of the titles in the line-up have played with us, and four of those heading for Miami are Kiwi shows - Blind Bitter Happiness, Brutal Lives, Kura and TransGenerations. 

The 2024 edition of Die Seriale has announced its selections, with eight titles from #NZWF23 continuing their successful runs. Congrats to them - and to all the shows selected. We'll give a special shout-out to one of our local winners, K' Rd Chronicles, which will be flying the Kiwi flag in Germany in June.

Late last month, Canada's Banff World Media Festival named the nominees for the Rockie Awards, to be handed out in June. Newer iterations or seasons of a couple of our 2019 winners are in the mix: Dreaming Whilst Black and Farm Crime. Podcast The White Vault and series Less than Kosher, both part of our 2023 edition, are also nominees  - along with a few titles already submitted to us this year.

Congrats to all of them - and good luck for June!

ENJOY

Our regular shout-out for content you might enjoy - suggested not by an algorithm or AI, but by real, breathing humans.

This month we're shouting out an awful lot of NZ content, one show and two profdev initiatives that have produced an awful lot of titles over the years. 

Creamerie (above) is from the team that started out a little over a decade ago with Flat 3, The show was a finalist at our first edition and spin-off Friday Night Bites won at our third. Coincidentally, the team is musing on the journey so far at an event in Auckland tomorrow evening.   

Someday Stories has produced quite a few selections, finalists and winners at editions of NZ Web Fest over the years, the most recent being last year's Hand in Hand. They're also running an event tomorrow night in Auckland, the launch of their new brand as the organisation evolves from The Outlook for Someday to Day One.  

Loading Docs, which will shortly announce its titles for 2024, has also contributed several factual selections, finalists and winners to our editions over the years, including last year's Testimony.

Dig in and enjoy! 

*

We love to give shout-outs to new content in these newsletters and on our socials, but we don't have much time to trawl for it every month. 

If you're releasing something, be it something brand new or a new season, shamelessly self-promote by dropping us a line or adding admin@nzwebfest.co.nz to your media list if you're fancy and have one of those.

Tell us the what, when and where, and we'll help spread the word. We'll give preference to stuff that isn't geo-blocked or behind pay-walls, but all-comers are welcome :)

If we don't know, we can't share, so do tell us. Help us to help you!

LOOKING  FOR  LAURELS

If you're looking for some festival love and laurels, fill your boots :)

Running this month is Spain's Carballo Interplay, 3-7 April.

Web Series World Cup and Audio Fiction World Cup festivals with deadlines coming up this month include 

Apulia, 27 April, Late Deadline

Baltimore, 30 April, Regular Deadline  

Minnesota, 30 April, Regular Deadline  

Rio, 30 April, Earlybird Deadline 

Also open for submissions at present are

Marseille 

New Jersey

Panama

Rio

Stareable

Sydney

Toronto

and - of course - NZ Web Fest.

HELP  US  GROW

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We post a few times a week, mostly to facebook and instagram. Our X is more podcast-focused than our other channels, and LinkedIn and Threads we only use occasionally.

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