Privacy Policy

What this policy covers

FilmScorecard (filmscorecard.com) is a platform that film festivals use to manage their submissions and run their judging. This policy explains what personal information reaches the platform, why, and what happens to it. It covers the people who hold accounts (festival hosts, their staff, and judges) and the people who do not but whose information a festival brings in (submitters).

Where this policy says we or the platform, it means the operator of the platform. Where it says a festival or a host organization, it means the organization that runs a festival on the platform.

Information from account holders

Festival hosts, festival staff and judges hold accounts. To create one we collect your email address and your name, and we record the date and the version of the terms you agreed to. There is no password: signing in sends a one-time code to your email address.

Judges may add a profile: a short biography, the categories and genres they want to judge, the festivals they have judged for, a location, a photo, and their availability. Festivals see this profile when they consider inviting a judge. Judges choose what to put in it.

Hosts and staff add the details of the festivals they run: the organization's name, its festivals, their seasons, categories, awards, scorecards and settings. Staff members are added by invitation from their organization.

The platform also records when an account last signed in, the messages exchanged between a festival and a judge inside the platform, and the changes made to submission records, so a festival can see who changed what.

Information about submitters

Most people whose information is on the platform do not hold an account. They submitted a film or a script to a festival through a submission platform such as FilmFreeway, and the festival brought those submissions into the platform to judge them, either by importing a CSV export of its submissions or by connecting its FilmFreeway account so that the platform reads them directly from FilmFreeway.

Either way, the platform receives what the festival's submissions contain: typically the title and details of the work, the names and contact details of the people who made it, and a link to a screener. Where the festival's export or its FilmFreeway account includes them, it can also receive personal details such as date of birth, gender, pronouns and postal address. Only the festival's staff can see these; judges never do. The festival decides what to bring in; the platform stores what it is given.

The host organization controls this information. It collected it, it decides how it is used, and it is responsible for having the right to bring it here. The platform processes it on the festival's behalf so the festival can judge its submissions. If you are a submitter with a question about your information, the festival you submitted to is the right place to ask first, and we will help them answer.

A festival can release a scorecard to a submitter. When it does, the submitter reaches it through a link and a one-time code sent to the email address on the submission. If a festival charges for scorecard access, the purchase is handled by Stripe as described below.

When a festival emails a submitter through the platform, the festival's staff can see whether each email was delivered, delayed, bounced or marked as spam, and the reason given for a bounce.

The festival's staff can also see when the submitter opened their scorecard page or their submission page, which of the festival's emails they opened it from when they followed a link in one, and what they did there: signing in with the code, starting a checkout, unlocking the full scorecard, sending feedback on it, creating or turning off a share link, saving a share card, saving changes to the submission, and saving the submission to an account, with that account's email address.

Blind judging and a judge's identity

Judging on the platform is blind between judges. A judge scoring a submission cannot see what any other judge scored or wrote, and the platform is built so that this is true of what leaves the server, not only of what appears on the screen.

A judge's identity is used to assign them submissions, to record which scorecards they filed, to pay them where a festival pays its judges, and to show the festival's coordinators who scored what. Scorecards released to submitters carry the scores and the written feedback; they do not name the judge who wrote them.

Judges are told which festival they are judging for. Submitters are not told which judges scored their work.

Payments

Payments on the platform run through Stripe Connect. A festival that sells scorecard access connects a Stripe account, and Stripe collects the information it needs to do that directly from the festival.

When a submitter buys scorecard access, they pay on a page hosted by Stripe. Card details never reach the platform. What the platform records is that a purchase happened, the amount, the receipt number, and the email address the receipt was sent to.

A filmmaker who buys Creator Pro pays on a page hosted by Stripe, and Stripe keeps the card and billing address it needs to charge the plan and work out tax. The platform records the plan, its status and dates, and Stripe's references to it.

Stripe's own privacy policy governs what Stripe does with the information it collects.

How the platform is used

To run the platform and to improve it, we record how submitters use the pages the platform gives them: the scorecard page, the submission page, and the page that asks for their code. For example: how long a page is in view, which sections are opened, which steps of a checkout are reached, whether a promo code was accepted, which fields a form refused, whether a poster upload worked, and when something on a page fails. We also record the kind of device used, as phone, tablet or desktop.

This record never holds an IP address, a browser's full details, anything typed into a field, keystrokes or mouse movement. It is tied to the submission it concerns, and to the submitter's account when they are signed in, and only we read it. It is never shown to a festival or to any third party, it is never sold, and we use it only to operate the platform and to improve it.

It is kept for 25 months and then deleted, or sooner if the submission it concerns is deleted.

Who processes the information

The platform runs on services that process information on our behalf. Supabase hosts the database and the sign-in service. Vercel hosts the application. Stripe handles payments and payouts. Resend delivers the email the platform sends: sign-in codes, invitations, notices to judges and coordinators, receipts, and scorecard links. It tells the platform whether each email was delivered.

Cloudflare runs the person check on the beta registration form, the contact form and the contact form on filmmaker pages: its Turnstile widget reads signals from your browser and sees your IP address, to tell people from automated traffic.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it with anyone else for their own purposes.

How long information is kept

A festival's records, including the submissions it imported and the scorecards its judges filed, are kept for as long as the festival keeps them on the platform. A festival can delete a festival and everything under it. Deleting an account does not delete the festival records the account worked on, because those belong to the festival.

Sign-in records, messages, change history and the record of what happened to each submission are kept with the account or the festival they belong to. The record of how the platform is used is kept for 25 months, as described above. Messages sent through the contact form are kept so we can reply and keep a record of the conversation.

We may keep information longer where the law requires it, or where it is needed to resolve a dispute.

Cookies

The platform sets only the cookies it needs to work. One keeps you signed in. One carries the email address you are signing in with between the page that asks for it and the page that asks for the code, and it is removed once the code is checked. One remembers that a submitter has unlocked a scorecard, so they do not have to enter a code on every visit. One remembers that a visitor has entered a filmmaker's page password, for that page only.

Three more remember your choices. One remembers that you chose Not now when a scorecard offered to keep it in an account, for that scorecard and only until you close your browser. One remembers the last project you opened, for a year, so the app opens it again. One remembers, for a year, that you pressed OK on the notice about these cookies.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, and no third-party tracking on the platform.

A filmmaker's public page counts its views, visitors, link clicks and video plays per day, and where its visitors came from. To count each visitor once a day without a cookie, the page combines the visitor's IP address and browser with a random value that is replaced every day and then deleted, and keeps only the scrambled result, for that day only. No IP address is stored and nothing is placed on your device. Where a visitor came from is recorded as a website's name only, such as Instagram, never the page or link. Visits by the filmmaker, and by people signed in as staff or judges at a festival the film was entered in, are not counted.

A message sent through a filmmaker's page is stored and emailed to that filmmaker.

Your choices

Account holders can see and change their own name, profile and notification settings from their account. If you want a copy of the information we hold about you, want it corrected, or want your account removed, contact us and we will do that.

If you are a submitter, contact the festival you submitted to first, because the festival controls that information. You can also contact us, and we will pass your request to the festival and help them respond.

How to contact us

Use the contact form on this site, or email [email protected]. We read every message.