Kino London Short Film Festival

The BIFA Qualifying Kino London Short Film Festival is run by filmmakers for filmmakers.

All of our festival preselectors, programmers, and jury members are entirely comprised of award-winning filmmakers who understand your frustrations with the wider festival circuit. We’re frustrated too, but rather than just bitch about it we decided to start our own festival to give you the experience we wish we had.

WHAT MAKES OUR FESTIVAL DIFFERENT?

1. AUTHENTIC INCLUSIVELY

Too many festivals try to reverse-engineer diversity and end up being “tick-boxy”. We know filmmakers are smart enough to see right through that. Instead, we know that true diversity comes from having a diverse programming team who, as filmmakers themselves, understand that beautifully, polished, well-crafted films can still be made by talented working class individuals at the beginning stages of their creative careers. Just because your film looks pretty, doesn’t mean you’re privileged - it means you’re talented. We pride ourselves on balancing our diversity standards with being “talent focused”. Our programming team is made up of eclectic, international taste-makers, and we want to program films that will have a wide appeal vs a pretentious niche.

To hold ourselves accountant to delivering a diverse program, we base our submission categories based on the budget of your film. If you’ve made a film on an iPhone with mates in your backyard then you won’t be competing with someone who has a rich uncle or got BFI funding - we separate those categories.

2. TRANSPARENCY

Some festivals claim to treat their filmmakers like royalty. Hell, from our experience, we’d just like most festivals to treat us like human beings. That means we will respectfully communicate and engage with submitting filmmakers. If you choose to submit to our festival you won’t be screaming into a silent void. Every filmmaker can receive feedback from our programmers if they request it. This data will prove to you that we’ve watched and thoughtfully considered your film AND it will give you insight into how competitive your film is/isn’t in the wider festival circuit.

3. WE BUILD INTO YOUR FUTURE

Every filmmaker whose work is Officially Selected into our festival will get free submission to the 2025 Summer Funding Round of our Kino London Short Film Fund powered by Genera Film. Our fund grants up to £5000 in funding to cover the costs of Production, Post- production or Distribution. Additionally, it includes a free weekend hire of one of a bespoke camera and lens packages sponsored by The Unit Bag.

Additionally, once your film is finished with the festival circuit, we offer short film distribution, either via our our own Short of the Week platform OR by introducing you to one of our partners. We’ve helped short filmmakers find distribution on Omeleto (YouTube’s #1 channel for short film), Klipist (the #1 ranking short film streamer on Google), and more. Festivals are great, but let’s face it, online exposure for your film is in the thousands or hundreds of thousands, while festival audiences are in the hundreds.

OUR SELECTION PROCESS

All of our festival preselectors, programmers, and jury members are entirely comprised of award-winning filmmakers - you know, people qualified to judge films.

All submissions are reviewed by one of our preselectors. Preselectors then recommend which films should be viewed by our programming team.

The programming team watches all films deemed worthy by our preselector team, then they meet to debate which films should be programmed based upon how many films we can fit into the time we’ve been given in our cinemas. NOTE: last year we expanded our festival from 4 days in cinema to 6 days because there were just too many great films we didn’t want to reject.

Once the programming team has made the final decision on Official Selections, they start to deliberate about which films should be nominated for awards. The programming team decides the nominees, and the nominees get sent to our Jury.

Jury members vote in whatever category(s) they are qualified to vote in. For example, if a jury member is a composer, they will vote for the Best Score Category and not the Best Screenplay category.

Award Winners are decided based on popular vote from our Jury.

History:

Although Kino London has been operating events since 2009, the Kino London Short Film Festival first opened for submissions in 2019. The festival was founded under the name Kino London presents The People’s Film Festival, however in 2022 we decided to unify our brand with our other Kino offerings. We also run the Kino Short Film Open Mic, Kino Short of the Week series, & now we’ve changed our name to the Kino London Short Film Festival. In 2022, our festival was recognised as a BIFA qualifying film festival.

As one of the founding members of the Association of Independent Film Festivals (a new watchdog organisation that ensures members adhere to strict ethical practices), we pride ourselves on hosting physical screenings at premiere arthouse cinemas in London, keeping our submission fees reasonable, being transparent about our process, and being a fair & communicative partner in your journey to get your short film to audiences.

More information about AIFF can be found here: www.aiff.uk