FilmFreeway Festival Scraper

What does FilmFreeway Festival Scraper do?

FilmFreeway Festival Scraper extracts public film-festival listings, submission deadlines, category-specific entry fees, event dates, venues, ratings, and qualification badges from FilmFreeway. It turns nested deadline and fee schedules into structured JSON that can be downloaded as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML.

Why scrape FilmFreeway festivals?

• Submission planning: find festivals closing inside a specific date window.
• Fee comparison: compare current standard and Gold fees across categories and deadline tiers.
• Festival research: build datasets of locations, years running, ratings, reviews, and qualifying badges.
• Market analysis: track how submission pricing and calendars differ by genre or project type.

What data can it extract?

Field	Description
name, url, festivalId	Festival identity and canonical profile
location, city, state, country	Location from the directory listing
entriesOpen	Whether structured deadline and fee data is available
deadlines	Every dated row with label and FilmFreeway's current/upcoming/outdated state
categories	Submission categories with nested deadline tiers and fees
feesFlat	Analysis-ready category × tier × fee rows
currentDeadlineDate, finalDeadlineDate	Derived submission deadline dates
minCurrentFee, maxCurrentFee	Comparable current non-Gold fee range
eventDateIso, eventDateText	Event start date and displayed range
rating, reviewCount, badges	Reputation and qualification metadata

How to scrape FilmFreeway

1. Open the Actor and add FilmFreeway directory, curated-collection, or festival profile URLs.
2. Set Maximum festivals to cap output and cost.
3. Turn on Get deadlines and entry fees for full profile enrichment. Direct festival profile URLs are always enriched.
4. Run the Actor and download the Dataset.

Search for open festivals

{
  "startUrls": [],
  "openSubmissionsOnly": true,
  "deadlineBefore": "2026-12-31",
  "projectCategories": ["5", "9"],
  "getFestivalDetails": true,
  "maxFestivals": 100
}

Scrape individual festival profiles

{
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://filmfreeway.com/BeverlyHillsFilmFestival" }
  ],
  "maxFestivals": 10
}

Use a curated collection

{
  "curatedCollection": "academy-award-qualifying-festivals",
  "getFestivalDetails": true,
  "maxFestivals": 50
}

Input notes

Leaving startUrls empty builds a FilmFreeway directory search from the filter fields. Country filtering is applied to directory-card location text because FilmFreeway's own country parameter does not reliably filter results. A direct profile URL cannot supply the directory-only location, city, state, or country fields.

FilmFreeway challenges ordinary server HTTP fingerprints even on residential IPs. The Actor therefore uses a pinned Python Impit Chrome transport with up to three prevalidated sticky residential sessions. A session keeps one IP, cookie jar, and client fingerprint together; challenged identities are retired as a unit instead of sleeping and retrying through random IPs. The Actor caps listing pagination at FilmFreeway's page 253 ceiling, text and nested arrays are bounded, sitemap enumeration never exceeds maxFestivals, and debug mode stores at most 20 failed-page artifact pairs.

Warmup tries at most three identities before work begins. Runtime replacement is capped at two more identities. Each identity is capped at 20 pages or 10 minutes. The circuit breaker stops the run when more than 20% of the last ten requests are challenged across at least three distinct URLs, so one unusually protected profile cannot falsely classify the entire site as unavailable.

Output example

{
  "url": "https://filmfreeway.com/ExampleFestival",
  "slug": "ExampleFestival",
  "name": "Example International Film Festival",
  "entriesOpen": true,
  "location": "Austin, Texas, United States",
  "currentDeadlineLabel": "Regular Deadline",
  "currentDeadlineDate": "2026-09-01",
  "finalDeadlineDate": "2026-11-01",
  "minCurrentFee": 35,
  "maxCurrentFee": 70,
  "currentFeeCurrency": "$",
  "categoryCount": 9,
  "deadlineCount": 4
}

How much does it cost?

The Actor uses pay-per-event pricing. Basic directory records and entries-closed profiles use the festival-listing-scraped event. Profiles containing structured deadline data use festival-detail-scraped. The Apify Console shows the current event prices before each run; maxFestivals is the hard spend-control lever.

Limitations

• Deadline and fee blocks exist only while a festival accepts submissions. Entries-closed profiles are returned without those arrays.
• $ is mapped to USD only as a best-effort convenience because the symbol can also mean CAD, AUD, or NZD. Use the literal currency and raw fee fields for trusted comparison.
• FilmFreeway's organizer websites, emails, and social links are login-gated and are not included.
• The site declares a 20-second crawl delay. The Actor enforces that interval independently on each sticky identity. At the default three sessions, budget roughly 60 + ceil(total HTTP requests / 3) × 20 seconds and raise the Apify run timeout for very large crawls.
• The Actor emits only fully parsed listing or detail records. In a directory or curated search, a profile that remains inaccessible after bounded attempts emits no record and is replaced from a bounded backlog of later listing cards. Direct profile failures and systemic session-pool failures still fail the run loudly. The Actor never writes placeholder or fallback records.

FAQ

Why are location fields empty for a direct festival URL?

Festival location is present on FilmFreeway directory cards, not the public profile. Use a directory or curated-collection start URL when location is required.

Why can an entries-closed item have no deadlines or fees?

FilmFreeway removes both structured blocks when submissions close. The Actor positively detects the site's Entries Closed marker and returns the remaining festival metadata.

Is scraping FilmFreeway legal?

This Actor extracts publicly available data. Check FilmFreeway's terms and applicable laws, and use the data only for a legitimate purpose.

Support

Use the Actor's Issues tab for bugs and feature requests, or the API tab for programmatic runs.

This Actor does not intentionally extract private data. Public pages may still contain personal information such as organizer phone numbers or mailing addresses. Ensure you have a lawful basis before collecting or processing personal data.