I've worked for festivals - this is a common practice called the 'test screener' where a nearly finished film is submitted with the understanding that tweaks and improvements have to be made. Similar to how studios do test footage as part of the proposal package. In our case, the majority of action animation was completed whereas proper lipsyncing was only done up to the halfway point (the rest being unsynced mouth flaps to demonstrate intent) and small things like blinking had yet to be added.
