Film festival ticketing software and websites

BIFF — Bergen International Film Festival. Norway's largest film festival, presenting over 120 documentary and fiction films a year with a dedicated documentary focus.

The Norwegian International Film Festival, Haugesund. Norway's first film festival, and host to New Nordic Films — the Nordic co-production and finance market that has run alongside it since 1995, which is exactly the industry-and-public split described above.

Both run on the same platform that runs year-round cinemas, including Edda Kino, which is the Haugesund festival's main arena for one week a year and an ordinary five-screen cinema for the other fifty-one.

Most festival websites are cinema websites with the wrong content model bolted on, and it shows in the same places every time.

The programme is not a slate. A cinema publishes what is on this week. A festival publishes strands, themes, competition sections and sidebars, and a film belongs to one or more of them. Flatten that into a chronological list and you have destroyed the thing the programmers spent a year building.

Screenings are singular. A film plays once, maybe twice, often in a venue you borrowed for ten days. Everything about inventory, waitlists and sold-out handling behaves differently when there is no second chance next Tuesday.

Passes are sold before the programme exists. People buy an early-bird pass in March for a festival in October, then redeem it against individual screenings when the programme lands. That is a fundamentally different commerce model from selling a ticket to a known show.

Industry and public are two audiences in one building. Accredited delegates, press screenings, market events and screenings that must never appear on public sale — alongside a public programme that must. Getting that wrong is not a cosmetic error; an industry screening listed publicly has commercial consequences.

Festivals search for the same purchase under three names. A film festival ticketing system sells single tickets and passes against one live inventory. Film festival management software adds the programme, sections, venues, guests and accreditation. A festival website publishes all of it. When the three are separate products, the programme is typed in three times and the pass a customer bought in June has to be matched by hand to the screenings they pick in August.

Filmgrail is one system for all three: the programme you publish is the inventory you sell, passes are redeemed against it, and industry screenings sit beside the public ones without appearing on the public site. Comparing vendors? See film festival ticketing platforms compared and Filmgrail vs Eventive.

A cinema's traffic arrives steadily. A festival's arrives in a single spike the hour the programme is announced, and again when passes open. Those two hours carry a disproportionate share of the year's sales and essentially all of the reputational risk.

Two things break under that load: the site itself, and the checkout. A festival site that goes down during its own programme announcement is the story of the festival that year, and it is remembered longer than the programme is.

Plan for it explicitly. Announce at a time you have staff available. Have the programme fully entered and previewed before the embargo lifts, not during. And load-test the checkout against the actual concurrency you expect, not against a normal Tuesday.

Most festival platforms make you sit through a sales call to see anything. We would rather you saw your own festival running. Build your festival's prototype in 30 seconds from your current website, or book a festival walkthrough and we will set up your sections, venues and passes for the conversation.

Comparing platforms? Read how we stack up against the alternatives on festival ticketing platforms compared.