Ahead of this year’s Marché du Film in Cannes, former festival distributor Moritz Schneider is launching Miralot, a data-driven film festival matching and submission platform aimed at helping filmmakers navigate the increasingly fragmented global festival landscape more strategically.
The Berlin-based platform, founded by Schneider and Justus Timm, is backed by Roger Crotti, former Disney chief for Germany, Austria and Swizterland; Dennis Ruh, former director of the Berlin Festival’s European Film Market; and Joe Pawlas, former chief marketing officer at Netflix for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Crotti, who previously served as president of the Zurich Film Festival and was last year appointed to Constantin Film’s supervisory board, Ruh, who now heads the Seriesly Berlin series festival, and Pawlas are shareholders and key advisors in the venture, which has also secured other financial and tech investors.
Likewise boasting serious bona fides is Miralot’s management: Schneider, the company’s CEO, has more than 15 years of experience in international festival distribution. He co-founded Swiss boutique agency Cut-Up, whose clients went on to receive Oscar nominations, BAFTA wins and awards at major festivals, including the Berlinale. He also headed Festival and Sales at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), one of Switzerland’s leading film schools. Timm, meanwhile, serves as Miralot’s co-CEO, overseeing operations and finance. He previously built and scaled a B2B platform business with more than 50,000 customers, including a successful strategic exit.
For Schneider, the time is right for a service that can help filmmakers find the most suitable festivals for their films. Festival submissions have become increasingly expensive and difficult to navigate for filmmakers, he says. With more than 15,000 festivals worldwide and submission fees continuing to rise, filmmakers often spend thousands of dollars navigating a fragmented festival landscape and submitting to competitions that are ultimately the wrong fit for their work.
Miralot, he adds, was built to change that by combining festival discovery, matching and submission for filmmakers worldwide. The company currently includes more than 5,500 curated festival competitions across 80 countries, ranging from major international festivals to regional and genre festivals.
“There are more ways to reach a global audience than ever, and almost no map for any of them,” Timm stresses. “That is the gap we are closing, for every rights holder, whether they are bringing a single debut or a catalogue of two hundred titles. Rights holders spend years and millions creating a film. We owe them infrastructure that takes the release and everything after it as seriously as the years before.”
That potential is what convinced Crotti to join the business: “Miralot is rethinking film distribution with a powerful combination of industry expertise and AI- and data-driven technology,” he says. “I invested because I see the potential for a true paradigm shift in how films connect with festivals, buyers and audiences worldwide.”
For Ruh, Miralot aims to achieve goals he himself has championed.
“Festival strategies and the patterns behind festival programming have been a central part of my professional work from the very beginning,” says Ruh. “Over many years, I have actively worked on developing festival strategies and advising filmmakers, sales companies and institutions on how crucial precise positioning and informed strategic thinking are within the festival ecosystem.”
“What convinced me to become involved with Miralot is the combination of deep festival expertise with a highly analytical, data-driven approach to developing tailored strategies while also helping festivals receive submissions that genuinely fit their programming profiles. I believe this has the potential to make the relationship between filmmakers, rights holders and festivals significantly more effective and meaningful.”
While festivals are currently the platform’s primary focus, Miralot sees the broader opportunity in helping filmmakers better understand how films move through the international landscape and ultimately find audiences worldwide.
In using the platform, filmmakers upload their projects and receive tailored festival recommendations based on such factors as genre, runtime, language, premiere status and previous festival selections, allowing them to discover suitable matches and submit directly to festivals through Miralot with one click.
The matching and submission platform helps filmmakers reduce unnecessary submission costs, improve festival discovery and avoid redundant submissions through curated recommendations rather than unfiltered listings.
Schneider notes that most filmmakers “don’t struggle because their films are bad. They struggle because the festival landscape is fragmented, expensive and extremely difficult to navigate without industry experience. We wanted to give filmmakers access to the kind of strategic insight that previously only established festival distributors had.”
The platform already boasts a rapidly growing number of gratified users.
“Instead of pushing filmmakers through layers of complicated discovery platforms, Miralot has simplified the process of identifying where a film truly fits, while keeping the economics transparent,“ says Indian director-producer Deepti Chawla of Mumbai-based Inflixious Content & Art.
Bangladeshi helmer Mashroor Parvez echoes the sentiment: “What I like about Miralot is that it treats festival strategy less like gambling and more like authorship. It brings structure and intelligence to a process that usually runs on guesswork.”
In providing the ideal service, Miralot has collected years of historical festival selection data alongside live submission and acceptance data across the platform. The company sees this growing dataset as a foundation for further developing its matching system and helping filmmakers navigate the international festival landscape even more strategically.
The platform is already used by filmmakers from more than 50 countries across Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa and Oceania, spanning projects from short films and documentaries to arthouse and genre features. For festivals, Miralot offers increased visibility among filmmakers actively searching for festivals that are the right fit for their work, including competitions they may otherwise never have discovered.
Miralot is also helping film students to better grasp the complexities of the international festival circuit, says Steve Reverand, co-director of the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic.
“At the Prague Film School, we’ve introduced Miralot to guide our students through the often overwhelming landscape of film festivals. Such a curated, intuitive platform helps them identify the best opportunities for their student films to get noticed.”
