Story? – International Student Documentary Festival, the only international student documentary film festival of its kind in Ireland, has been running for four years. The fifth festival will take place in April 2023 in Cork City, Ireland.
The festival is run by the Crawford College of Art and Design, at Munster Technological University (MTU), in association with MTU’s Arts Office.
The festival will screen two main types of student documentary – documentaries and animations that have a documentary element. In the festival, we have screened documentaries from Cork, Ireland in general, the UK, Europe, the USA, South America, Asia and Africa. This year we hope to again attract vibrant student work from all over the world. Documentaries can be no longer that 20 minutes.
Filmmakers whose documentaries were featured at previous festivals came to Cork for the awards ceremony and had a great time exploring its attractions.. The festival didn’t run in 2022 - due to Covid-19 restrictions - but now we are back on track and we will extend an invitation to visit Cork to the filmmakers whose work is chosen for the 2023 festival. Films will screened in the intimate Rory Gallagher Theatre, named for the world famous Cork blues/rock guitarist Rory Gallagher, in the Gate Cinema in Cork City and in a number of interesting and intimate locations around Cork City.
Story? has a strong link with CampusDoc, an international student documentary film festival that is held in the Dutch city of Utrecht every June. CampusDoc alumni have had their films shown at Story? in recent years.
This year a number of prizes will be on offer: first prize goes to the best documentary of the festival and there will be five more prizes: Best of Cork; Best Animated Documentary; Best European Documentary; Best International Documentary and an Audience Award.
At the inaugural festival in 2018, the prize for the best documentary went to “Inside the Circle”, by Lauren Bos and Hein van den Bogaert from the Netherlands. In 2019 the prize went to “Da Hillsook Wedeen”, made by Hope Strickland from Manchester, England. The winning documentary in 2020 was “The Sisters“, by Michal Hytroś from Poland and the winner in 2021 was “The Gull”, by Arman Ayvazyan, Russian Federation.


Awards will be given in six categories. A trophy and/or certificate will be presented in each category

• Best Documentary of the Festival
• Best of Munster
• Best Animated Documentary
• Best Irish Documentary
• Best International Documentary
• Audience Award

• Submissions will be accepted under two categories – documentaries and animations that have a documentary element, made by third-level students
• The documentaries can be about any topic
• Running time is a maximum of 20 minutes for each documentary
• Submission is open to current university and third-level students, along with university and third-level students who graduated in 2020, 2021 and 2022
• English subtitles will be required for all non-English language documentaries that are screened
• Awards will be given in six categories – Best Documentary of the Festival; Best of Munster; Best Animated Documentary; Best Irish Documentary; Best International Documentary and Audience Award.
• The winning documentaries in each category will be shown during the festival
• Shortlisted documentaries may also be shown during the festival
• Initial uploads should be to Vimeo or Utube. If your film is selected for screening, you will be asked to submit it in the following manner:
• Resolution: Full HD (1920x1080), 16:9 Widescreen (preferable). Frame rate: 25fps. Scan type: progressive. Video codec h.264 (min 15 – max 40 mbps). Audio codec AAC (min 160 kbps), 44KHz. Container: MP4. File size (*) up to 360 MB.
• If your documentary is accepted for screening, you will be asked to submit a screenshot of the video in the following way: Format; JPEG. Colour space RGB. DPI 300 dpi. Size: 1920 x 1080 px. File size: up to 6MB.
• The Jury’s decision is final.