FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Hiike is a platform that connects filmmakers with film festivals. Filmmakers can discover festivals and submit their work, while festivals can manage calls for entries, review submissions, and build their communities.

Create an account, then choose whether you're joining as a filmmaker looking to submit work or as a festival looking to manage submissions.

Creating an account is free. Some actions, such as submitting to a festival, may involve a submission fee set by the festival.

On the site, there are two main profiles: Filmmaker and Festival Organizer.

Filmmakers can upload their projects, take a quiz to find matches, and submit to festivals. Festival organizers manage festivals, accept submissions, and handle the usual processes on the site. You can add a new profile by clicking on Profile icon and then “Add Profile” button.

You can switch profiles by clicking the Profile icon, hovering over Switch Profile, and selecting the profile you want.

On the sign-in page, choose Forgot password? and enter your account email. We send you a code; enter it, then choose a new password.

You can deactivate it by opening the Profile icon, going to Profile Settings, and selecting Deactivate Profile.

Open the festival’s page and choose Submit to Festival. Then:

1. Choose your film and category.
2. Answer the festival’s submission form, if it has one.
3. Review and pay on Stripe’s secure page.

You can add several festivals to your cart; each one is checked out and paid separately.

As a guideline, we highly recommend filling in all fields and providing truthful information about the project before submitting.

Genre, sub-genre, filming location, and duration should be confirmed with the festivals you plan to submit to.

If your video upload gets stuck or stops unexpectedly, please check your internet connection and (if applicable) your VPN. If the issue persists, please contact support.

We also recommend using link upload instead of file upload—it’s faster and provides a better experience.

Festivals hand out waiver codes to reduce or cover their submission fee. Enter the code at the Review and pay step of checkout, before you pay; the new total shows right away.

Your submission appears on your Submissions page with its current status. We email you when the festival team first opens it, and again when they accept or decline it. Each festival decides on its own schedule.

• Submitted: the festival has your entry but hasn’t opened it yet.
• In Review: the festival team has opened it.
• In Consideration: it’s on the shortlist and a decision is pending.
• Accepted or Declined: the festival’s final decision. You get an email either way.
• Cancelled: you cancelled the submission.

You can cancel a submission from your Submissions page while its status is still Submitted, before the festival opens it. Cancelling can’t be undone.

Hiike doesn’t handle refunds: they are up to each festival, so contact the festival directly.

The Quiz is a paid feature that helps filmmakers find the festivals that are the best fit for their project. You provide details about your project, and after payment you receive your quiz results: a curated list of matching festivals along with their specifications.

Our database currently includes over 400 festivals in the USA to match against, and we’re continually working to grow that number.

When you submit a project to a festival, its organizers can see your name, bio, pronouns, gender, affinity, date of birth, phone number, address, and account email alongside your submission.

You can update these details anytime in Profile Settings. Changes also appear on submissions you’ve already sent.

Select Sign Up in the upper right-hand corner, create your account, and choose the Festival Organizer profile. You land in Manage Festival, where the sidebar walks you through everything a festival needs: Festival Page for your festival details, Categories & Deadlines for your categories and deadlines, Review Preferences, and Financials for payouts.

You’re receiving these reminders because one or more festival organizer profiles are still in draft. To stop them, complete all required fields and submit the profile for review. If you don’t need the profile, you can archive it by opening the Profile icon, going to Profile Settings, and selecting Deactivate Profile.

Yes. On the Submission Form page, add the extra questions you need. Filmmakers answer them during checkout, and the answers appear on each submission.

Yes, you can create multiple deadlines with variable submission fees. Add as many as you need in Categories & Deadlines → Dates & Deadlines, name them Early Bird, Regular, Late or anything else that suits your festival, and set a separate fee for each one.

Yes. In Categories & Deadlines → Category Settings & Costs, every category carries its own fee, and that fee can differ per deadline — so a short film at the early-bird deadline and a feature at the late deadline can be priced completely independently.

Discount and waiver codes are created in Financials → Waiver Codes using Create New Code. You choose the code itself, whether it takes a percentage off or a fixed amount, how many times it can be used, when it expires, and which categories it applies to.

Yes, you can customize your waivers and offer special discounts to individuals, groups, organizations, or really anything you can think of.

Create the code in Financials → Waiver Codes and share it directly with whoever it’s for. Limits on uses, expiry date, and eligible categories keep it being used exactly the way you intend.

Most organizers need 30–40 minutes to create a festival profile and fill in all the information. After you submit it for review, our team checks it before it goes live, usually within a day. See How long does it take to review my festival?

To publish a festival:

1. Complete all required fields in your festival.
2. Open your Festival Page.
3. Click Submit for Review.
4. If anything is missing, you’ll see a list of the fields you still need to complete.
5. After you submit, we’ll review your festival and publish it if everything looks good.

If there’s an issue, we’ll contact you by email with next steps.

Yes. To keep scam festivals off the platform, we vet every festival before it can publish. If something needs changing, we’ll email you with next steps rather than leaving your profile in limbo.

Usually less than a day, and never more than 1–2 days. We’re notified the moment you submit, so reviews tend to happen quickly.

During the review we check that your festival is genuine and eligible to accept submissions, which keeps scam festivals off Hiike. If anything needs changing, we’ll email you with next steps.

The Branding Assets page has your festival link, Submit on Hiike buttons with ready-made embed code for your website, and official Hiike logos to download for your promo materials.

Yes. Open Staff & Roles in the Festival Manager sidebar and invite your team by email — several people at once if you like. Each invite gets a role: Admin, Coordinator, Programmer, Screener, Judge, Finance Manager, Viewer, or Custom.

Each staff member has a role, and each role is a set of permissions grouped into festival profile and content, staff, submissions, reviewing, submission forms, financials, connections, and sponsorships. In Staff & Roles, pick a preset role (Admin, Coordinator, Programmer, Screener, Judge, Finance Manager, Viewer) or Custom, then tick or untick individual permissions. Changing a preset turns it into Custom.

Every role, including Custom, always includes View Festival Profile, which shows the Festival Page. Pages someone doesn’t have permission for are hidden from their sidebar. The festival owner always has full access.

Inviting or removing staff requires Manage Staff; changing someone’s permissions also requires Assign Staff Permissions.

Open the invitation email and follow the link. Sign in, or create an account with the same email the invitation was sent to. You’ll see a welcome card with your role and what you can do; choose Get started to open the festival.

Yes. Invite them from Staff & Roles with the Screener, Judge, or Programmer role. They sign in with their own Hiike account and see only the festival work assigned to them.

Yes. Every role is a set of permissions you can adjust per person in Staff & Roles, covering festival content, staff, submissions, reviewing, submission forms, financials, connections, and sponsorships.

To narrow things further, use Review Preferences → Reviewer × Category Assignment to decide which categories each reviewer is responsible for.

Yes. In Review Preferences → Evaluation Criteria, add your own criteria and give each one a weight. Hiike is the only platform that supports weighted reviewing criteria, so the things that matter most to your festival count for more in the final score.

Yes. Reviewers score every submission against your criteria, and you can switch on Enable Comments in Review Preferences → Reviewer Options so they can leave written notes as well.

Yes. Festival Submissions lets you filter by category, genre, type, status, duration, filming location, submitter location, and submission date — and you can group the whole table by category in one click.

The filmmaker gets an acceptance or rejection email straight away and sees the new status on their Submissions page. Accepted and Rejected (shown to filmmakers as Declined) are final and can’t be changed later.

If you aren’t ready to decide, move the submission to In Consideration instead: no email is sent, and you can still accept or reject it later.

Rejecting doesn’t refund the submission fee. Hiike doesn’t handle refunds; if you choose to refund, you do it from your own Stripe account (see How do refunds and chargebacks work?). Filmmakers are also emailed when someone on your team first opens their submission, which marks it In Review.

Yes. Select the submissions you want in Festival Submissions and choose Export CSV. You pick which fields to include, from project details and filmmaker contact information through to reviewing scores.

A planning tool for your lineup in Festival Program. On the Program tab, group accepted films into program blocks, add custom items such as Q&As or breaks, and check each block’s runtime. On the Schedule tab, set up venues and theaters and place blocks on the timeline.

The program is for your team only and isn’t shown publicly.

Connections link your festival with related festivals so you can feature each other. In Connections, send a request with the other festival organizer’s email. They get an email and can accept or decline. If they aren’t on Hiike yet, the request waits until they join.

Once connected, each festival decides on its own whether to show a Connected Festivals section on its public page, and which published connections (up to 10) appear there. Either festival can disconnect at any time.

Hiike offers the lowest fees of any festival platform. Our standard fee is 5% if your festival uses Hiike exclusively, and 10% if your festival uses Hiike along with other platforms.

The fee is deducted automatically from each submission payment, so there’s nothing to invoice or pay separately.

No. There are no setup fees to use Hiike, no annual fees, and no charge to create or publish your festival. You only pay the percentage on submission fees you actually collect.

Yes, Hiike is able to charge submission fees in USD, CAD, GBP, and EUR. Which one applies follows the country you select when connecting your payout account in Financials.

You can connect a payout account based in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, or Italy. Pick the country where your festival or the account holder is legally based when you add your bank account in Financials.

Don’t see your country? Email support@hiike.com and we’ll get back to you quickly.

Festivals are paid out monthly through Stripe. Connect your account under Financials → Payout Account; once Stripe has enabled charges and payouts, submission revenue reaches your bank account on that schedule.

The same page shows your total revenue, net revenue, and commission at any time, and Manage Account takes you back into Stripe whenever you need to update your bank or account details.

All refunds and chargebacks are managed through Stripe. Issue a refund or respond to a dispute from the Stripe dashboard of the account you connected to your festival; the adjustment then shows up in your Hiike Financials figures and in your next payout.

Yes, and plenty of festivals run both while they transition. Hiike offers a 5% rate for festivals that use Hiike exclusively, which is far cheaper than FilmFreeway’s 12% rate — so exclusivity is worth considering once you’ve settled in.

Create a festival profile and start populating it. Moving an existing festival takes about 20 minutes on average, because the information already exists on your current listing and only needs copying across.

There is no direct way to import your festival’s information from another platform. However, copy and paste works just as well — the fields on Hiike map closely to what you already have.

Export the full submissions list from your other platform (such as FilmFreeway) as a CSV, then upload it in Festival Submissions → External.

• ID column required. The file needs a "Submission ID", "Entry ID", or "FilmFreeway Submission ID" column. Rows without an ID are skipped.
• Runs in the background. One file imports at a time, and the list updates as it finishes.
• Re-uploading updates, never duplicates. Upload a newer export whenever you like; entries with the same ID are updated in place.
• Reviewing. You can assign reviewers to imported entries and score them in Hiike.
• Decisions without emails. Each entry starts with the status from your CSV. You can then move it to In Consideration, accept or reject it like any Hiike submission, and a later re-upload never overwrites a status you changed in Hiike. Its submitter is never emailed.
• Undo an import. Deleting it from the Imports list removes the entries that file last updated.

They will still be on FilmFreeway and can be managed from there. If you’d rather work from one place, export them and bring them into Hiike as external submissions.

No, Hiike and FilmFreeway can both be used together for as long as you need. The only difference is the rate: 10% while you use other platforms too, 5% once you’re exclusive to Hiike.

Emails, newsletters, social media, and directly speaking with your filmmakers is the most effective way to tell them you’ve changed platforms.

It helps to lead with the reason: Hiike vets every festival before it publishes, so filmmakers know they aren’t submitting into a scam.

Yes. Open Branding Assets to copy your festival’s official link for your website, socials, and promo material, or to grab a ready-made embed snippet for a branded submission button in the size that fits your page.