Short short movies are lowering the threshold of filmmaking, five minutes at a time
W hen Beijing-based filmmaker Ikram Nurmehmet received an invitation a few months ago from the organizers of the FIRST International Film Festival to shoot a movie, he hesitated to accept. The reason was the organizers’ two conditions: The film had to be under five minutes long, and be shot on a mobile phone or other portable device.
Those were the requirements for entries in the Short Short Film Competition at FIRST, an annual film festival that turns the sparsely populated northwestern city of Xining in Qinghai province into a hub for Chinese indie filmmakers and filmgoers every July. The “short short film (超短片),” however, is not something exclusive to FIRST, save for the name. In fact, this short-form filmmaking is becoming increasingly popular in both China and other parts of the world.
Held quarterly in Chicago since 2019, the Big Teeth Small Shorts Film Festival calls these five-minute pops “small shorts,” while setting aside a special category for what they call “micro shorts” that run under 90 seconds. Last year’s Beijing International Film Festival included the Samsung Short Mobile Film section, entries to which also could not exceed five minutes, while this year’s edition had a Short Video section for works under 10 minutes in length. Supported by Sony Xperia, Tokyo’s Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia has also held a Smartphone Film Competition for the past two years.
Amarsanaa Battulga is a Shanghai-based film critic, researcher, and associate editor of ChinaNauts, an online magazine on contemporary China. When he is not watching, researching, or writing about films, he enjoys playing board games, practicing classical Mongolian, and thinking about going to the gym. He cannot ride a horse.
