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A filmmaker offers a few tips for festivals to attract animators—and ensure that they keep coming back.

Here are the call for entries from three quality festivals: KLIK! Animation Festival in Amsterdam, Animateka Int’l Animated Film Festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the New York Int’l Children’s Film Festival.

The KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival will take place in November 2013. In addition to awards for professionals, students, 3D stereoscopic and commissioned animation, they also hand out the Amsterdam Audience Award, the Young Amsterdam Audience and Political Animation Award.

Submission is FREE. Films should be 25 minutes and under and produced after January 2012. Deadline is July 1st. For full details, go to KLIK’s submission page.

The 10th edition of Animateka International Animated Film Festival will take place from December 2 to 8 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. For its main competition, the festival accepts films from Central and Eastern European countries, but its children and student competitions are open to other countries. Here’s the breakdown:

There will be an international competition open to films realized for the cinema with any animation technique, frame by frame or computer graphic. Short animated films (the duration of which must not exceed 35 minutes of the total running time) produced or co-produced in the following countries are eligible to apply for the Central and Eastern European Competition Short Animated Film Programme: Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Slovak Republic, Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine.

Children’s films from all countries worldwide are eligible for competition in the children’s programme Elephant. European student films (produced within a public or private educational institution of an EU member country) are eligible for the European Student Competition Programme.

Submission is FREE. Deadline is September 15. For complete rules and application forms, visit Animeteka’s website.

The New York Intl Children’s Film Festival, which bills itself as North America’s largest film festival for children and teens, is now accepting submissions for next year’s edition that will run March 7-30, 2014. The festival is looking for “creative, original, non-formulaic works that will help to define a new, more compelling film for kids,” and they further state that, “we are not shy about showing films with mature themes, subject matter, language or sensibilities, especially for our teen and pre-teen audiences.” The festival is closely affiliated with film distributor GKIDS, which has been the U.S. distributor of features like The Secret of Kells, From Up on Poppy Hill and the forthcoming Ernest and Celestine.

Submission fees range from $25-75. The early deadline for shorts is September 15 and October 15 for regular. The early deadline for feature length films is October 15 and November 15 for regular. To enter, visit the festival’s submission page.