Ahead of this year’s Marché du Film in Cannes, former film festival distributor Moritz Schneider is launching Miralot, a data-driven film festival matching and submission platform aimed at helping filmmakers more strategically navigate the increasingly fragmented global film festival landscape.
The Berlin-based platform, founded by Schneider and Justus Timm, is backed by Roger Crotty, former Disney head of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Dennis Lu, former director of the Berlin Festival’s European Film Market; Joe Paulus is the former Chief Marketing Officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Netflix.
Mr. Crotty, who was previously chairman of the Zurich Film Festival and was appointed as Constantin Film’s supervisor last year, Mr. Lu, who is currently in charge of the Seriesly Berlin Series Festival, and Mr. Paulus are shareholders and key advisors in the business, which has also secured other financial and technology investors.
Likewise, Miralot’s management team boasts serious integrity. Schneider, the company’s CEO, has more than 15 years of experience in international festival distribution. He co-founded the Swiss boutique agency Cutup. Its customers have since gone on to be nominated for an Oscar, win a BAFTA and win awards at major festivals such as the Berlinale. He was also responsible for festivals and sales at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), one of Switzerland’s leading film schools. Meanwhile, Tim serves as co-CEO of Miralot, overseeing operations and finance. Previously, he built and grew a B2B platform business with over 50,000 customers, including successful strategic exits.
For Schneider, the time has come for a service to help filmmakers find the best festivals for their films. Festival submissions are becoming increasingly expensive and difficult for filmmakers to handle, he says. With over 15,000 festivals around the world and entry fees continuing to rise, filmmakers often spend thousands of dollars navigating the fragmented festival landscape and ultimately entering competitions that are inappropriate for their work.
Miralot was built to change this by combining festival discovery, matching and submission for filmmakers around the world, he added. The company currently has a curated selection of more than 5,500 festival competitions across 80 countries, ranging from major international festivals to regional and genre festivals.
“There are more ways than ever to reach a global audience, but there are few maps to any of them,” Tim emphasizes. “That’s the gap we’re trying to fill for all rights holders, whether it’s a single debut feature or a catalog of 200 titles. Rights holders spend years and millions making movies. We owe them the infrastructure to take release and everything after that as seriously as we did before.”
That possibility is what led Mr. Crotty to decide to participate in this project. “Milaroto is reimagining film distribution with a powerful combination of industry expertise and AI and data-driven technology,” he says. “I invested because I saw the potential for a real paradigm shift in how film connects with festivals, buyers and audiences around the world.”
For Lou, Milaro aims to achieve the goals he himself championed.
“Festival strategy and the patterns behind festival programming have been a core part of my professional work from the beginning,” says Lu. “For many years, I have been active in developing festival strategy and advising filmmakers, distributors and organizations on the importance of accurate positioning and informed strategic thinking within the festival ecosystem.”
“I decided to get involved with Miralot because we are combining our deep festival expertise with a highly analytic, data-driven approach to develop customized strategies while helping festivals receive submissions that truly fit their program profile. I believe this has the potential to make the relationship between filmmakers, rights holders and festivals more effective and meaningful.”
While festivals are currently the platform’s main focus, Miraro is seizing broader opportunities by helping filmmakers better understand how their films move through the international landscape and ultimately find audiences around the world.
The platform allows filmmakers to upload their projects, receive customized festival recommendations based on factors such as genre, showtime, language, premiere status, and past festival selections, find suitable matches, and submit directly to festivals through Miralot in one click.
The matching and submission platform helps filmmakers reduce unnecessary submission costs, improve festival discovery, and avoid duplicate submissions through curated recommendations rather than unfiltered lists.
Schneider says that most filmmakers “don’t struggle because their films are bad. They struggle because the festival landscape is fragmented, expensive, and very difficult to navigate without industry experience. We wanted to give filmmakers access to the kind of strategic insight that traditionally only established festival distribution companies had.”
The platform is already seeing a rapidly growing number of satisfied users.
“Rather than putting filmmakers through layers of complex discovery platforms, Miralot has simplified the process of identifying where a film really fits, while keeping the economics transparent,” said Deepti Chawla, Indian director and producer at Mumbai-based Inflixious Content & Art.
Bangladeshi helmer Mashroor Parvez agrees, saying, “What I like about Milarot is that it treats festival strategy more like authorship than gambling. It brings structure and intelligence to a process that usually relies on guesswork.”
To provide the ideal service, Miralot has collected historical festival selection data over the years, along with live submission and acceptance data across the platform. The company sees this growing dataset as a foundation to further develop its matching system and help filmmakers more strategically navigate the international festival landscape.
The platform is already being used by filmmakers in more than 50 countries across Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania, with projects ranging from short films and documentaries to arthouse and genre features. For festivals, Miralot increases visibility among filmmakers who are actively searching for the best festivals for their work, including competitions they might not have found otherwise.
According to Steve Levelland, co-director of the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic, Milalot helps film students better understand the complexities of international film festivals.
“At Prague Film School, we introduced Miralot to guide our students through the often overwhelming film festival landscape. Such a curated and intuitive platform will help our students identify the best opportunities for their films to get noticed.”
