Judging Criteria

Our editors go through every submission together.

To break it down,
submissions are selected
based on the following criteria:

Relevance

Exploration of the theme, as revealed through your written or visual elements. Does the idea behind your work connect to the given theme? Do you make concrete connections to your selected film/scene/shot? How clear is it? We want to make sure that with the theme in mind, you picked your film with care and built your creative process around this.

Personal connection

Depth Cues is all about connecting cinema to our own experiences. We want distinctive, sentimental pieces- not something impersonal that reads right out of a textbook.

Something new

Give us something we haven’t read or seen before! As past film students and self-proclaimed cinephiles, the medium holds a special place in our heart. We want to read and see pieces that not only go beyond anything else we’ve come across, but truly speak to who you are and what you’re about.

“When I was young and starting in cinema there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart— ‘The most personal is the most creative,’”

and of course…

Follow the guidelines!

Many submissions have been passed on purely because they did not follow guidelines. Please make sure you pay attention to these. Something as simple as a wrong subject line in your e-mail could be the difference between a rejection and acceptance!