Built by a producer who burned the fees first

I am a working producer. I spent the back half of a decade making short films and features the indie way: the spreadsheets, the late-night premiere maths, the strategy meeting we could never afford with a sales agent, the £75 entry fee that turned out to be a festival nobody in the room had heard of.

The first time I burned a world premiere by accident I lost a Tier 1 slot I had been quietly building toward for nine months. There was no warning, no system, no person to tell me what I was about to do. Just a yes from a regional festival I should have said no to.

I built the early version of Circkit for myself. Then for the producer next to me. Then for the 50+ working filmmakers we interviewed over a year: directors, producers, doc-makers, animators. Every single one with a version of the same story.

Circkit is what you get when you take all of those scars and turn them into software. Premiere Guard exists because of a phone call I never want anyone else to make. The festival fit scoring exists because a programmer at a Tier 2 told me most of the films she receives were never right for her festival. The Insider briefing exists because the gap between “has a sales agent” and “does not” is the cruellest gap in this business.

For the record, so you know whose scars these are: I am a multi-award-winning producer and writer. I took an MFA in Producing at the National Film and Television School and was named a BBC Film Scholar in 2024. My films have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, BFI Flare, Raindance and Reeling, and at festivals across the US, Europe and beyond. I have worked with BBC Film, Big Talk Studios, Bankside Films and Ascendant Fox, alongside Cannes-winning producer Dora Galosi and directors with BAFTA and Oscar recognition. I have also collaborated with producers whose recent films have premiered at Sundance, SXSW and in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, including Igor Engler, founder of Dryeye Film, whose work premiered in competition at Tokyo and won Best Director, and Angelina Bok, an NFTS-trained producer whose films have played Sundance, Tokyo and Taipei Golden Horse. Circkit is the strategy I wish I had run on my own films, turned into software.