The Nail That Sticks Out began its festival run earlier this year when it was nominated for 2 Midlands Movies Awards. The nominations came in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories with Natsumi Kuroda and Laura Peterson recognised for their brilliant performances. Following on from our Midlands Movies nominations, The Nail was nominated for a further 2 awards at the Nexus Film Awards. We were thrilled that The Nail won the Best Drama Film and Best Actress awards at the awards ceremony in Nottingham.
Our most recent festival success came when we became an Official Selection at the Lift-Off Global Network Sessions. Lift-Off Global Network is an organisation encompassing worldwide live screening events, distribution initiatives, a seasonal awards ceremony, and an ever-growing and active Network of indie film creators. Lift-Off are based at the world-famous Pinewood Studios and began as a film festival but have grown into a huge platform for indie filmmakers offering advice and support for emerging talent as well as showcasing films around the world in their festivals and screenings.
The process for this particular film festival is different from the standard model used. Around 500 films are selected and split into 5 ‘collections’ that are put up online on Lift-Off’s Vimeo page. To access the collections audiences are required to pay for the collection. Once you have paid for the collection you have access to all of the films in that collection and then the audience cast their votes for their 2 favourite films from that collection. At the end of the week, the top 5 films from each collection as voted for by the paying audience become finalists and are viewed by an industry panel were 1 winner is chosen from the best 20 films. We were thrilled to find out that The Nail was very well received by the audience and collected enough votes to move through to the finalist round as one of the top 20 films from the close to 500 films that were initially selected for the festival.
One of the perks of being a finalist we received a Lift-Off Global Network membership for free which allows us free submissions to Lift-Off festivals in the future along with a wide range of other benefits including access to industry posted jobs, career road-mapping, production support. Receiving recognition from an institution like Lift-Off is something we are very proud of.