A new and completely hidden film festival is coming to Toronto on July 27 and 28. The premise: buy a ticket to a movie without knowing any details, and without finding out what you’re seeing until you’re in the theatre. Intrigued? The catch is that it’s up to you to get the word out.

In partnership with the Film Festival Guild, Hidden Film Festival is a movement to give independent flicks maximum exposure and build extra awareness. Taking place in a new city every Saturday throughout July, the film festival moves from city to city: Toronto, Paris, Dublin, and London. With limited screenings, each movie gets a premiere in one of the four cities. No industry press is invited and tickets are few.

The promotion of the films all come from spectators: tweeting, blogging, and talking about what we’ve seen. Hidden Film Fest will make sure viewers are able to engage by allowing you to write down tweets on paper (for non-smart phone users), with sample tweets coming up during breaks at screenings. A livefeed will connect festival-goers through all four cities, instantly revealing reviews of the film.

With major studios depending on their pre-release promotion for the a huge portion of sales and success, it’s a gamble for producers to be putting promotion into the hands of social media and word of mouth. But the buzz that the Hidden Film Fest is bound to generate might do that work for them. Besides, all these films are independents – with a presumambly unknown group of filmmakers, we imagine their promotion would run on that kind of business anyways. This isn’t lazy, it’s smart PR.

We called out Cineplex last month for asking people to spend more on a movie ticket that includes a digital download before knowing if they even like the movie. But the Hidden Film Fest seems shenanigan free, as the festival comes with it’s own charm of the surprise and what they’re calling a new cinematic experience. Plus, tickets aren’t especially expensive ranging between $10 – $13 – it’s just your average night out at the movies with a little more of a spontaneous feel.

This concept would be especially appealing to people like my mother, who refuse to hear any details about a movie before seeing it and was annoyed with us for telling her Jamie Foxx appeared in Django Unchained. 

Limited tickets to the two Toronto shows can be found here. Pair your night at the movies with a blind dinner at O’Noir if you really want to have no clue what’s you’re getting into that eve.

Watch the worldwide trailer, which unsuprisingly keeps details of the flicks under wraps:

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Farrah Khaled is an intern at the Toronto Standard. Follow her on twitter at @farkhaly.