What is a short film?

How long is a short film in practice?

The 40 minute ceiling is an outer limit, not a target. Most shorts land well under it, and the commonest range sits between 5 and 15 minutes.

There is a practical reason for that. Festival programmers build screening blocks of roughly 90 minutes, so a 10 minute film slots into a programme easily while a 35 minute film has to earn its place against three or four others. The longer a short runs, the fewer programmes it fits.

Very short work has its own traditions too. One minute and three minute categories are common at festivals, and the discipline of them is real: a single idea, delivered once, with nothing spare.

Where the 40 minute rule comes from

The Academy sets the number for its own awards. Its short film categories, Live Action Short Film, Animated Short Film and Documentary Short Film, each define an eligible film as one running no more than 40 minutes including credits.

Not every body uses the same figure. Other national academies and individual festivals set their own limits in their submission rules, and those vary, sometimes allowing more running time for documentary work than for scripted work. If you are submitting a film, read the specific rules rather than assuming the 40 minute figure applies.

The gap between a long short and a short feature is genuinely blurry. Films in the 40 to 60 minute range are sometimes called featurettes, and they are hard to place: too long for most short programmes, too short for most feature slots.

What short films are for

Two answers, both true.

The first is that a short is a calling card. It is how most directors show what they can do before anyone hands them a budget. A good short travels the festival circuit, gets seen by people who finance films, and turns into meetings. Plenty of well known features started as a short by the same director.

The second is that the short is a form in its own right, and not a rehearsal for something longer. It does what a short story does next to a novel. One idea, one turn, and out. A feature has room for subplots and second acts; a short usually has one central question and a single emotional shift.

The four main kinds

Live action

Actors, camera, the largest category by volume and the one most festival programmes are built around.

Animation

Everything from hand-drawn to stop motion to CG. Animation and the short form suit each other, because the cost per minute is high enough that brevity is a practical decision as much as an artistic one.

Documentary

A single subject, a single situation, often one person. The short documentary is where a lot of the most direct non-fiction work happens.

Experimental

Films that are not built around plot at all, and work through image, rhythm or sound instead.

Those categories leak into each other constantly. An animated documentary is a normal thing to make.

Where to watch short films

Shorts have historically been hard to see. They rarely get a cinema release on their own, they are not what streaming subscriptions are built around, and for a long time the only reliable way to watch them was to go to a festival.

That has changed. Klipist streams hand-picked short films free, with no subscription and no account required. You can browse the full catalogue, or narrow it down by genre, by mood or by theme if you would rather start from how you want to feel than from what the film is about.

Festivals remain the best place to see new work first, and the major ones run short film competitions with their own juries and prizes.

Short films and short dramas are not the same

The vertical short drama apps that have grown quickly in the last few years are a different form, despite the similar name. Those are serialised, shot for a phone screen, and built to be watched in episodes of a minute or two. A short film is a single self-contained piece of work made for a screen of any size. We have written about the difference between short films and short dramas separately.

If you want to make one

If you are writing your first short, the single most useful discipline is to know what your one idea is before you start, and to cut anything that is not serving it. We have a longer piece on writing a short film that delivers.

If your film is finished, Klipist accepts submissions from filmmakers. See how submissions work.