I built Circkit because I lived the problem it solves. Before it was a product, it was the spreadsheet, the late-night research, and the guesswork I ran on my own films.

I trained as a cinematographer and then took a Master of Fine Arts in Producing at the National Film and Television School. Along the way my work screened at the BFI London Film Festival, BFI Flare, Raindance and Reeling. From the outside, a festival run looks like a series of happy announcements. From the inside, it is one of the highest-stakes, lowest-information decisions a filmmaker ever makes.

Here is what nobody tells you when you finish a film: the festival circuit has rules you can break without ever being told you broke them. Premiere status is the clearest example. Many of the biggest festivals will only take a film that is having its world, international, or national premiere with them. Submit to the wrong festival too early, let a film screen somewhere that technically counts as a premiere, and you can quietly disqualify yourself from the exact festival you were building toward. There is no warning. The rejection just looks like a rejection.

That nearly happened to me. I came close to spending an early premiere on a festival that, in hindsight, was never going to move the campaign forward, while the festival that actually mattered required the premiere I was about to give away. I got lucky. Plenty of films do not, and most filmmakers never find out what the near-miss cost them.

The other half of the problem is money. A serious festival strategy means submitting to dozens of festivals, each with its own fee, its own deadline tiers, and its own odds. The costs stack quietly into the thousands. Spend it in the wrong order, on the wrong festivals, and you have funded a year of rejections that taught you nothing about where your film actually fits.

So I did what producers do. I built a system. I tracked which festivals were qualifying routes to BAFTA and the Academy Awards, which ones protected a premiere and which ones spent it, which programmers responded to which kinds of films, and how to sequence submissions so each result informed the next. It worked. And every time I ran it, I thought the same thing: this should not be a private spreadsheet that lives in my head. It should be software, and every filmmaker should have it.

That is Circkit. It is the festival strategy I ran on my own campaigns, turned into a tool. You tell it about your film, and it helps you pick the festivals that genuinely fit, protect your world premiere, and chart the qualifying path toward BAFTA and the Oscars, without burning your budget on submissions that were never going to land.

Two principles mattered to me from the start. The first is that the strategy has to be honest about odds and rules, not just a longer list of festivals to pay. The second is privacy: your film and your strategy are yours. Circkit is built so that your unreleased work and your festival plan stay private, which, if you have ever guarded a premiere, you will understand is not a small thing.

I am still a producer and a writer first. I still make films. But I kept meeting filmmakers making the same expensive, irreversible mistakes I almost made, and I had already built the thing that would have saved them. Building the festival strategist I wished I had had was the obvious next move.

If you are about to take a film out, I would rather you spent your first festival fee on the right festival than learned the premiere rule the way I almost did.