Cleveland International Film Festival (AD 2025) submission deadline is creeping up!
To be held through March 27-April 5, 2025 in person at Playhouse Square in downtown Cleveland in the US state of Ohio—and online through April 6-13, 2025 as part of CIFF49 Streams—the 49th Cleveland International Film Festival has been collecting submissions for consideration since June 8, 2024.
The ‘regular deadline’ for making a submission to CIFF49 is November 1, 2024, with the ‘final deadline’ set for December 20, 2024. There are different fees for different genres of submissions and depending upon the type of deadline that a submission would have been able to meet.
The festival will include ‘14 competitions for feature films and 20 competitions for short films’; it ‘accepts films of any runtime, any genre, and from every country’—and in ‘short films’, it accepts ‘live action, animated, and documentary.’
The only format in which the festival will accept these submissions is the Digital Cinema Package (DCP).
The festival will not accept a submission if it were produced before June 1, 2023; if it were already made ‘available publicly online’; or if it had been ‘exhibited in person within the Greater Cleveland area, as CIFF requires a CLEVELAND PREMIERE at the least.’
The CIFF49 website states that the previous year the festival ‘gave away over $135,000 in cash awards!’
To make your submission, head over to the festival’s website by clicking here; see the website’s partial screenshot below.
This is a partial screenshot of the call for submissions put out by CIFF49 (2025).