Hi everyone! Ellis here. Just wanted to flag Coffeehouse Cinema Vol. 8 is right around the corner on Friday 8/28, and tickets go on sale Monday 8/17, so mark your calendars and stop by the Coffeehouse! Okay let’s get into the article.

Why Are We Putting Expiration Dates on Short Films?

At Coffeehouse Cinema Vol. 7, we screened a short film called Fool’s Day in front of a group of probably 70 to 80 people, and without spoiling the movie too much, the premise is that a group of kids decide to prank their teacher on April Fool’s Day, the prank goes very wrong, and from there the kids have to figure out how they are going to fix the problem they have created.

There is a very particular moment in the movie where the entire dynamic of the film changes, and you can almost feel the audience realizing together that the movie they thought they were watching is suddenly becoming something very different. By the end of the screening, it ended up being one of the audience’s favorite films of the night, and based on the qualitative feedback we collected afterward, it became one of the highest-rated films we have screened at Coffeehouse Cinema.

Then we told people the movie was made in 2013.

And people were genuinely shocked, because there was nothing about their experience watching the movie that made it feel old, dated, or somehow less relevant to them because it had been made more than a decade earlier. They just watched a great short film, had a strong reaction to it, and then found out afterward that the movie had existed for years before most of them had ever even heard of it.

When Did a Short Film Become Too Old to Matter?

That moment has stayed with me because, had Coffeehouse Cinema operated with very strict premiere requirements or completion-date requirements, there is a decent chance we never would have screened Fool’s Day at all, and if that were the case, then 70 to 80 people would not have had that experience, the filmmaker would not have had another room full of people responding to the work, and the movie itself would have remained something that, for this particular audience, basically did not exist.

And I think that gets at a larger question I keep coming back to when it comes to short films, which is whether the way we currently think about exclusivity, premiere requirements, and completion windows is actually helping short filmmakers, or whether we have created a system that benefits festivals in relatively small ways while limiting the long-term value of the work for the filmmakers who made it.

I understand why festivals care about premieres. There is obviously some value in being able to say that a film is having its world premiere, North American premiere, Los Angeles premiere, or regional premiere at your festival, and I understand that festivals are also trying to create a sense that what you are seeing in that room is new, current, and being discovered there first.

I am just not convinced that, particularly for short films, the value of being able to say that outweighs the value of giving filmmakers as many opportunities as possible to put their work in front of audiences.

Sundance Asked a Simpler Question: Is the Movie Good?

A long time ago, I had the opportunity to ask the head of shorts programming at Sundance a question that I think about much more now that I am programming films myself, which was whether premiere status actually mattered to them when they were evaluating a short film.

And the answer was basically no.

They did not really care whether the short had already played at other festivals, whether Sundance was getting the world premiere, North American premiere, or some other premiere designation, or whether the film had already been available online. In regards to short films, the philosophy was much simpler than that: Is the movie good, and does it fit within one of the blocks they are trying to build?

I have always remembered that answer because Sundance is one of the biggest film festivals in the world, and if there were ever a festival that could probably demand exclusivity from a short filmmaker simply because of the power of its name, it would be Sundance. And yet, at least in the way that philosophy was explained to me, the thing that mattered most was still the movie.

That is increasingly the philosophy I want us to have at Coffeehouse Cinema as well.

The Movie Matters More Than the Premiere Status

I do not really care when you made your movie. I do not particularly care whether another audience has already seen it, whether it has played ten other festivals, or whether Coffeehouse Cinema gets to put “Los Angeles Premiere” underneath the title on a program.

What I care about much more is whether the movie belongs in front of our audience.

Does it fit the kind of storytelling we respond to? Does it work alongside the other films we are programming? Is there something about it that I think is going to create a reaction in the room? Is it funny, moving, surprising, strange, thoughtful, beautifully made, or doing something that makes me want a room full of people to experience it together?

Because ultimately, that feels much closer to the actual job of programming.

And I think the Sundance example raises an important question for other festivals as well, because if one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world can build a shorts program without making premiere status the defining factor in whether a film belongs there, then smaller festivals should probably at least ask themselves why they sometimes place even greater restrictions on filmmakers.

What exactly are we gaining from that exclusivity, and is that gain greater than the opportunity the filmmaker might be losing?

Short Films Are Already Hard Enough to Monetize

Short films occupy a very strange place in the film ecosystem because we are still trying to figure out how to monetize them in any consistent or meaningful way. There are certainly exceptions, and there are filmmakers who get licensing opportunities, grants, branded work, online deals, prize money, or other forms of financial return, but for the vast majority of people making short films, the primary value of the short is not that the film itself is going to make them money.

The value is that the film demonstrates what they can do.

It shows people their taste, their voice, their ability to work with actors, their ability to write, direct, produce, build tension, create a world, make something funny, make something moving, or simply prove that when they are given resources and an opportunity, they know what to do with them.

In that sense, a short film is often one of the most important calling cards a filmmaker has, and if that is true, then it feels strange to me that we have also built a system where that calling card can, in some cases, begin losing value simply because enough time has passed since the filmmaker finished exporting the movie.

The Clock Starts the Moment the Film Is Finished

A filmmaker might spend a year writing a short, spend thousands of dollars producing it, call in favors, ask friends to work for free, spend months in post, and then finally finish the movie, only for a different clock to immediately start ticking.

Now they have to submit.

Now they have to wait.

Maybe they get into some festivals and get rejected from others, maybe they spend a year moving through the circuit, and then eventually they hit a point where certain opportunities begin disappearing, not because the film stopped being good, not because audiences stopped responding to it, and not because the filmmaker somehow stopped being talented, but because the movie was completed too long ago to qualify.

That is the part I have trouble with, because if the primary value of a short film is exposure, discovery, and demonstrating a filmmaker’s ability, why would we want to artificially shorten the amount of time filmmakers have to receive that value?

We Have Created a Culture of Disposable Shorts

In practice, I think it creates a culture where short films become increasingly disposable.

There is a new batch of films every year, those films cycle through festivals, another batch comes the following year, and eventually the previous group begins falling out of eligibility windows and filmmakers are implicitly told that it is time to move on, make the next one, and hope that the new film gets the opportunities the previous one did not.

And obviously filmmakers should continue making things. I am not arguing that someone should make one short film and spend the next fifteen years submitting it everywhere they possibly can. Part of being a filmmaker is continuing to grow, continuing to work, and hopefully making something better or at least different the next time.

But the fact that a filmmaker makes something new does not mean the previous film suddenly becomes less valuable.

We do not really think about feature films this way. We do not look at a feature film that was made ten years ago and think, well, unfortunately, the completion date has passed, so there is not much reason for anyone else to discover it. Movies find audiences years after they are made all the time, and sometimes a movie’s reputation, cultural relevance, or audience actually grows because people continue to discover it long after its original release.

So I think the question becomes, why should short films be treated so differently?

New Work Matters, But So Does Rediscovery

I am not saying that every film festival should abandon the idea of showcasing new work, because I actually think there is real value in that, and there are festivals whose entire purpose is to introduce audiences to what filmmakers are making right now.

I also do not think every shorts program should suddenly become a repertory program where half the films are from fifteen years ago.

But I do think there is a difference between prioritizing new work and treating older work as ineligible by default, because once those completion windows become too strict, programmers are no longer necessarily asking, “What are the best films for this audience?” They are asking, “What are the best films that happen to fit inside this particular date range?”

Those are not always the same thing.

What Does a Premiere Actually Do for a Short Filmmaker?

And I think premiere requirements raise a similar question, which is how much value a festival actually receives from being able to say that a short film is premiering in a particular city, region, country, or continent, compared with how much value the filmmaker may lose when that premiere status prevents them from accepting other screenings.

With a major feature, I understand the logic much more clearly. A premiere can be part of a larger commercial strategy. There may be buyers in the room, distributors paying attention, press covering the film, reviews being published, and an entire release strategy built around where and when that film is first shown publicly.

For most short films, that ecosystem does not really exist in the same way.

The premiere might be exciting, it might look good in a filmmaker bio, and it may give the festival something useful to market, but after that premiere happens, the filmmaker still needs people to watch the movie.

They need producers to see it, executives to see it, other filmmakers to see it, potential collaborators to see it, audiences to see it, and sometimes all they really need is one person in one room two or three years later to watch that movie and think, “I should talk to whoever made this.”

That opportunity does not become less meaningful because the movie is no longer new.

New to Whom?

If anything, I think we sometimes confuse something being new with something being undiscovered.

When those 70 to 80 people watched Fool’s Day at Coffeehouse Cinema, it was not new in any technical sense, because the movie had existed for more than a decade, but to almost everyone sitting in that room, it was new to them, and from the standpoint of the audience experience, I am not sure the distinction mattered very much.

They did not care that someone else had watched it in 2013. They cared that they were watching it now.

And that is where I think there is a real opportunity for film festivals, screening series, and other forms of exhibition to think differently about shorts programming, because there are probably hundreds or thousands of great short films that played festivals, had some version of a run, maybe got uploaded to Vimeo or YouTube, and then more or less disappeared from the active exhibition ecosystem even though enormous numbers of people have still never seen them.

Great Films Do Not Always Find Their Audience the First Time

Some of those films might have premiered at the wrong festival. Some might have had bad marketing. Some might have been made by filmmakers who did not have the right connections yet. Some may simply have been unlucky, and some might have been excellent movies that happened to exist at a time when the people who would have responded to them were not yet in the room.

None of those things make the movie worse.

What I would love to see is more programmers allowing themselves to rediscover those films, because if we loosen some of these restrictions, programming can become less about constantly recycling the newest possible batch of shorts and more about actually curating experiences.

You could pair a film made this year with something made eight years ago because they speak to each other. You could discover a filmmaker’s earlier work after becoming familiar with something they made recently. You could give an audience access to a movie that, for whatever reason, never got the attention it deserved the first time around.

And most importantly, you could give filmmakers more opportunities to get actual value out of work that often took enormous amounts of time, money, and effort to create.

Maybe Programming Should Be About Taste, Not Scarcity

I think that is ultimately the part that bothers me most about strict completion windows, because there is something strange about asking filmmakers to invest so much into making these films while simultaneously creating an exhibition system that can treat them as though they have a shelf life of twelve or eighteen months.

If a movie is still good, if an audience has not seen it, and if a programmer thinks it belongs in the program, I am not sure why the year it was completed should be the thing that disqualifies it.

I am also not convinced that the benefit a festival receives from saying “Los Angeles Premiere” underneath a film’s title is always greater than the benefit that festival might receive from simply having access to a much wider pool of excellent films.

And maybe that is the larger question worth asking.

Are we building short-film exhibition around what actually helps filmmakers build careers and helps audiences discover great work, or are we maintaining certain traditions because that is simply how festivals have always operated?

Because a great short film does not suddenly become less funny after a year, it does not become less moving after three years, and it does not stop demonstrating a filmmaker’s talent after five.

And if there is still an audience somewhere that has never seen it, I think there is still value in putting it in front of them.