It's been a crazy six years for our film festival - from a Covid-derailed opener lined up for the RGS in 2020 which required £5000 of ticket revenue to be refunded... to over 70 events spread out all across the country and beyond which in aggregate raised £20,000 for community projects and non-profits in 2025.

Now the dust has settled on this 6th year, Festival Director Greg Hackett is in reflective mood.

I've been involved in all kinds of events for all sorts of audiences over too many decades but I can honestly say that the 'adventure film festival' world is a different beast. I had a chat with my lovely neighbour in 2019 who just happened to run a festival in London for a different cohort, and she said with some confidence something which has stayed with me: "No one makes money out of film festivals."

Of course I sniffed at this because I've only ever been involved in events that make money so I couldn't see any reason why this should be any different. I could also see a couple of festivals out there that clearly were profitable, but before long the gap in the market I had seen was rapidly being narrowed and thanks to Covid the opportunity to launch something quickly and cleanly was stolen away. With no support from the government and no salary to furlough it was time for a 'squeaky bum pivot'.

15,000 people logged on to watch our hastily assembled virtual film festival in 2020 and this project and what followed revealed a whole other story that I had not been paying sufficient attention to. I had been so focused on the commercial outcomes, chasing sponsors, crushing costs, buying media and so on, that I hadn't thought enough about two important groups of stakeholders - filmmakers and communities. Today, filmmakers and communities are front and centre of all that we do, while sponsors, expensive venues and big fee adventurers have had to take a back seat.

So it turned out I COULD make money out of a film festival, just not for myself.

It takes years and years to build trust and loyalty as a festival, but a few festivals ago I had a moment of clarity where I realised I could outsource this trust to move swiftly. All I needed to do was provide the films to community leaders and they could do the rest. It's a simple idea in which we have become a supplier to our own events, except we don't own the events. You do.

So having solved the problem of serving communities and giving them a means to raise funds and inspire adventure, the next thing is to do more for the filmmakers.

This year we were able to feed £1000 back to filmmakers - £200 each to five films from different film length categories. But it isn't enough. The creative doc-making industry is a tough place to work. The TV market has crashed recently and the David Attenborough / Jimmy Chin / Robert Macfarlane productions that you see may make it appear healthy but this is the tip of a very cold iceberg. A bit like tennis or golf, if you're not lucky enough to be in the top 1% you're probably struggling.

So what do filmmakers get out of festivals? I had one filmmaker say to me once that he usually lost money by being in film festivals once submission fee, travel and other costs had been deducted. The general feeling is that you don't want to miss out, vanish off the radar, not be visible to possible distributors and sponsors. FOMO and networking. Sometimes you can draw a straight line from a bit of income back to a festival but mostly participation is about the feel-good factor, and wanting people to see and appreciate your work, catching up with your network, supporting each other. That's how it looks to me anyway. I wouldn't go as far as to say filmmakers are being exploited but I do think certain brands and organisations take advantage of their "raison d'être".

So where am I going with this?

My dream for LMFF is that £20k community money becomes £100K. That 50% of our events are overseas. Let's say we have 500 events in total all happening in that two week window. How cool would that be? What if we had a sponsor giving us a lump of cash that we could share with our filmmakers? Imagine if more and more athletes and adventurers would rock up to these community events helping them boost their coffers and delight their audiences? In this scenario, not only is our festival a festival that might help a filmmaker find new funding, it is also a distribution network in itself.

So that is the dream. If you think you can help us live it then get in touch. Our festival platform is built to scale up, but even so the bigger it gets the more complex become the tasks. Social media, website maintenance, community support, tech... it is a lot of plates to spin and a few volunteers would be welcome.

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