Contributor Guidelines

Offscreen welcomes unsolicited original (i.e. not published elsewhere) submissions, but strongly recommends all interested parties read the description of the journal and take some time to peruse the site to get a sense of the journal’s interests. Submissions should be emailed to the editor, Donato Totaro following the format guidelines below. It is advisable that you contact the editor with your proposal prior to submission. Offscreen frequently produces special thematic issues (see past issues for examples). If interested you may query the editor for information on upcoming special issues.

Format Guidelines

Your text should be formatted in either rich text or Microsoft Word format.

All film titles should be in italics and followed by the director and date, e.g., Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922). Paragraphs should be set off with a single space and no indent at the start of the paragraph. For citing your bibliographic references please use the parenthetical author system with conventional brackets, e.g., “In deference to the time I invested, I’m including, at the end of this essay, a list of films I’d planned to include in the film canon” (Schrader 35). And then include a bibliography at the end citing full bibliographic information, e.g.:

Paul Schrader. “Canon Fodder.” Film Comment. September/October 2006, 33-49.

Use endnotes only for explanatory and digressive comments. Rather than following the Word formatting for endnotes place endnotes in between double brackets as such [[This is the proper method for endnotes.]].

Any accompanying photos should be included separately, in JPG format at a maximum size of 1000 pixels wide, 72 dpi resolution. Our use of photographs falls under the Fair Dealing exception of the Canadian Copyright Act but it is the author’s responsibility to provide captions that source who the rights holder is for any photographs submitted (i.e. name of the DVD or Blu Ray distributor if a frame grab, name of the photographer, name of the film festival if provided by them, publicist, etc.). 

Minimum length requirements are as follows: 1000 words for book/film/dvd reviews and festival reports, 2000 words for articles/essays.

Upon acceptance we will need a brief author bio (70-100 words) and a photograph (400 by 400 pixels in size) that will appear at the end of the article in the author byline. Presently, Offscreen is sometimes able to pay contributors a small stipend according to word length, with the maximum being $100.00 Canadian currency. This could change according to our budgetary status.