Film festivals typically live on a studio’s or streamer’s platform, but Jack’d is betting that a dating app with 15 million users already has the built-in audience queer filmmakers of color have struggled to reach anywhere else.
Jack’d, the largest dating app for queer people of color in the United States, is launching its inaugural Jack’d Film Festival, a showcase and competition built around original films by queer creators, with a specific focus on work centering the experiences and perspectives of queer people of color. Mike Gauyo, and Dyllón Burnside, TS Madison, Miss Lawrence, Bobby Ashley will serve as judges.
The structure leans directly into the app’s existing user base. Submitting and joining the festival is free, but viewing the films and voting requires downloading Jack’d itself, meaning the festival’s entire audience is pulled from people already on the platform rather than a separate festival-going crowd. Selected films, both shorts and features, will stream exclusively in-app from November 2 through December 3, competing for a $20,000 prize pool split between a grand jury award and an audience choice award, each worth $10,000. Submissions are due by 5 p.m. PT on October 21 at jackd.com/filmfestival.
Jack’d Film Festival manager Tyrus Townsend said queer filmmakers have always told stories that challenge conventions and help people feel seen, and that the festival is designed to put those stories directly in front of an audience while giving that audience an active role in deciding which filmmakers get celebrated.
For queer filmmakers of color specifically, a group whose work has historically struggled to find festival placement or distribution pipelines built with them in mind, the model flips the usual order of operations: instead of a film needing to win over gatekeepers to eventually reach its audience, the audience and the voting power sit with the community the films are actually made for from the start.