Growing one-minute-film scene forges international contacts

In late October, representatives of various one-minute-film festivals convened in Florence upon the invitation of the Italian organizers of Videominuto PopTV . The Italian festival had taken place in September at the Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in the neighbouring city of Prato. The occasion for the invitation to Florence was a large-scale city culture festival (Festival della Creativit?) whose facilities the conference made use of and during which an international programme of selected one-minute films was presented in a trade-fair hall - to an audience of several hundred, mostly young, members!

Festival organizers and curators from over 10 different countries took part in the conference on one-minute films. In addition to exchanging news and views, attendees addressed issues such as possibilities for cooperation, copyright and the conception or definition of the one-minute film. As it turned out, although there are many common motives for organizing one-minute-film events, the approaches taken by the various festivals differ widely in terms of content and concept. The only thing all of them have in common is that they deal with films that are one minute long.

Competitions or events for films of a specific length have always been held - usually as the consequence of a technical limitation, e.g. the length of a Super-8 film cassette. But this kind of restriction is today obsolete. Instead, conceptual considerations are now behind the focus on a particular timeframe. This narrowly defined format poses a challenge to the filmmaker, forcing him to condense the content and, in the case of competitions, levelling the playing field by defining the same specifications for all participants.

The oldest festival of one-minute flms is the Festival Mundial do Minuto in Brazil. Founded in 1991, it regrouped on the Internet in September 2007 in cooperation with one of Brazil's major mobile communications providers (Oi/Telemar) after fears had been raised that it might not be able to sustain itself in the age of YouTube. Despite the recent changes, however, the Festival do Minuto is not an Internet festival. It still holds film screenings at 200 venues in 70 cities throughout Brazil - featuring all formats including 35mm film.

Local film showings form the basis for its one-minute colleagues in other countries as well, while the website is usually but a spin-off. Public interest in these events is very high - which may come as a surprise seeing as more than 100 films sometimes have to be ‘taken in’  in a single evening!

High viewer numbers are likewise reported by what is perhaps the youngest organization in the one-minute realm: Pravda One Minute in Lithuania reaches over 20,000 viewers with its screenings in the country's five biggest cities. The event character is what makes for the appeal of these showings, in Lithuania as elsewhere. Otherwise, the screening conditions vary widely among the one-minute festivals depending on the venue situation, the involvement of the organizers in other scenes, the organizational form and also the geographic location.

The Italian Videominuto in Prato consists for example of installations and screenings in the galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art, while the closing ceremony – featuring VJs and DJs – is a popular outdoor summer party in an amphitheatre with more than 1,000 guests.

In Canada by contrast, the events take place indoors at cinemas, such as is the case with the One Minute Film Fest in Toronto, or primarily online - in addition to club events - at Minute Moments based in Montréal. Another online-oriented and therefore international festival is Filminute (based in London) with 500,000 page views, and viewer votes coming in from 90 countries. Many organizers combine an online platform with live events. AZYL in Slovakia, for instance, shows programmes at the International Film Festival in Bratislava and year-round on the Internet as well.

The One Minute Film Festival Aarau (Switzerland) is put on like a classic film festival. In an event stretching over several days, more than 1,000 short films are shown. A similar strategy is followed by the Croatian One Minute Film Festival in Pozega, which consists of two-day competition programmes and then goes on tour through the region.

In this way, the event organizers find various routes to audiences and are able to address different target groups. The organizer of the 59 Seconds Video Festival , Project 59 (New York), for example, is anchored in the art scene and shows his collection of short, conceptual art videos worldwide for a corresponding audience.

Those mounting the festivals also display different forms of organization. In some cases a small circle of friends is behind the event, while elsewhere it's a group of dedicated employees of a media-sector company. The only organization that is firmly established is the Dutch One Minutes Festival with its One Minutes Foundation, which is allied with the Sandberg Institute art academy (Amsterdam). In addition to events on its home turf, the One Minutes Foundation also organizes a major international happening every two years, such as the upcoming exhibition in Beijing. In addition, the organizers cooperate with the Dutch documentary television channel Holland Doc, for which they compile an international programme series.

In view of the wide differences between them, the festival representatives at the Florence conference were not able to reach an agreement to found an international federation, but they were nonetheless very grateful for the invitation by the Italian organizers (Videominuto/Controradio) as an opportunity to conclude cooperations and arrange for future meetings.

What all those attending have in common is a focus on high-quality work, which distinguishes them markedly from the short videos that can be seen today on Internet file-sharing platforms. This can surely be attributed to the fact that the one-minute-film festivals are carefully curated and do not work only with viewer voting, but also with juries. It's surprising then that the number of entries to the one-minute festivals is still relatively low compared to short film festivals in general or even video hosters. For this reason, the scene is still of a modest size and the chances for short-film makers to get their work noticed correspondingly high!

(rww)