Anafi International Film Festival

The Anafi International Film Festival (AnafiFF) is a curated short film festival dedicated to independent cinema and bold, original voices. Founded by film professionals with experience in international festivals and cultural institutions, AnafiFF creates a space for encounter, exchange, and experimentation.

We view cinema as a fluid and unified medium. We are interested in works that blur genres, challenge form, and push narrative and visual boundaries. We welcome short films of all forms; fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental,that demonstrate innovation, risk, and strong artistic vision.

The festival takes place in June on the Cycladic island of Anafi, one hour from Santorini. Screenings are held primarily outdoors, across the island, accompanied by workshops, talks, and communal gatherings. AnafiFF prioritizes meaningful interaction between filmmakers, audiences, and the island’s local community.

For its 4th edition, AnafiFF turns toward the present not as a topic to be explained, but as a condition we inhabit. A present that keeps slipping away, raising the question: How soon is now?

In times of social and political turmoil, when the present feels unstable and constantly in flux. It shifts, recalibrates, dissolves into what comes next while carrying the residues of what has already passed. Shaped by speed, saturation, and constant consumption, the now is marked by urgency and exhaustion, where attention fractures and meaning is often postponed.

This year we are interested in films that engage with the world as it unfolds. Works that register and deconstruct the friction between the personal and the political, where intimate gestures, domestic spaces, and everyday choices are entangled with broader social, historical, and geopolitical forces. We are drawn to shifting ideas of home and belonging, to questions of place, displacement, return, and attachment, and to landscapes, urban or remote, marked by memory, conflict, or silence. To bodies moving through environments that may no longer feel stable, familiar, or permanent.

Rather than offering answers, this programme invites attentiveness, some risk, and most importantly presence. We welcome films that explore absence and visibility, urgency and inertia, stillness and rupture. Films that respond to acceleration, fatigue, and fragmentation, while carving out moments of care, resistance, and slowness. If your film is rooted in the now, shaped by its tensions, contradictions, and uncertainties, we want to encounter it.

PROGRAMMING & SELECTION

AnafiFF supports independent and low budget cinema and is drawn to bold, unconventional approaches, innovative forms, and edgy stories that challenge our perception. We are passionate teams with sophisticated, quirky, and maverick sensitivities, interested in films that take risks and move beyond the familiar.

We aim to create a programme that has the power to challenge and stir the waters, but also inspire, motivate, and spark connections between the art and the person.
The programming committee is composed of film professionals and cultural workers from a variety of backgrounds, interests, and talents. All selections are made through collective discussion, and everyone’s vote is thoroughly discussed and counts equally. Our core values of equality, transparency, healthy working environments, authenticity, and balance are supported by our actions.

Our programmers are not required to read submission cover letters and other supporting materials, but we encourage you to submit them in case they want to learn more about you and your work. As a rule of thumb, we do not share programming feedback with entrants. The AnafiFF programmers’ decisions are final.