The submission page says twenty-five dollars. You have a rough rupee figure in your head; you click pay, and you move on to the next festival on your list. A month later you look at the card statement, and the number is not the number you expected. It is rarely dramatic — a few hundred rupees here, a few hundred there — but across a submission season, it adds up to a fee you never agreed to and cannot see.

This is not a scandal. Nobody is hiding anything from you. It is simply that a price quoted in a foreign currency is an estimate until the money has actually left your account, and most filmmakers in India have never been shown where the difference goes. So here it is, line by line.

Four places the extra money goes:

1. The exchange rate you get is not the exchange rate you looked up

The rate you see when you search for the dollar rate is the interbank or mid-market rate. It is a reference number. It is not a rate anyone is offering you. When your card is used for a foreign-currency transaction, the card network converts at its own rate, which is set to sit slightly on the wrong side of the mid-market rate. You do not get to negotiate it and it is not itemised anywhere on your statement.

2. Your bank adds a cross-currency markup

Separately from the network's rate, most Indian banks charge a cross-currency or foreign-transaction markup on every international card payment. This is a real, named charge in your card's schedule of fees, and it varies a lot between issuers. Some travel-orientated cards charge nothing. Plenty of ordinary cards charge a few per cent. Look yours up once in the fee schedule PDF on your bank's site, as it applies to every international submission you will ever make.

3. GST is charged on that markup

The markup is a service fee, and GST applies to it. It is a small number in absolute terms. It is worth knowing about mainly because it is the point at which people stop being able to reconcile the statement against the price they were quoted.

4. You cannot claim any of it

If you are submitting through a registered company or LLP — a production house, a studio, or even a small one — a foreign submission fee usually arrives with no GST invoice you can use. The cost is real; the paperwork is not. For an individual filmmaker this changes nothing. For anyone running submissions as a business expense, it quietly makes every submission more expensive than its equivalent domestic cost.

In this example the real cost is about six per cent above the headline. Six per cent on one submission is not worth an afternoon of your attention. Six per cent across twenty submissions, on a short film budget you raised yourself, is a festival fee you did not get to spend on a festival.

Knowledge & Insights

What a festival submission fee actually costs you in India