St Kilda Film Festival

About

St Kilda Film Festival is Australia’s longest-running short film festival, and the heart of the program is Australia's Top 100 Short Films Competition. 

Each year the competition receives hundreds of submissions from around the country, shortlisting and screening the best 100 entries.

With a huge prize pool on offer, St Kilda Film Festival is also an Academy Awards qualifying event and award-winning films are eligible for consideration in the Oscars.

Awards

Australia's Top 100 Short Film Competition has a huge prize pool of cash and in-kind craft awards, including a $10,000 prize for Best Short Film. 

Other awards include:

• Best Director
• Best Achievement in Screenplay
• Best Documentary
• Best Achievement in Cinematography.

Rules

Call for entries closes 31 January 2024. Basic requirements for films submitted for the competition:

1. The St Kilda Film Festival short film competition only accepts Australian-made short film entries. The Festival also accepts Australian co-productions where:

• a significant proportion of key crew are Australian, OR
•  significant pre and postproduction occurred in Australia, OR
•  the film received significant funding from Australia. 

2. St Kilda Film Festival accepts all fiction and non-fiction film genres.

3. Films submitted must be no longer than 40 minutes, inclusive of credits.

4. The submitter grants St Kilda Film Festival the rights to:

• Exhibit the film online for the duration of the Festival, in a programmed session available ‘on-demand’ from the St Kilda Film Festival website via the approved streaming platform.
• Screen to a physical audience in a programmed session (dependent on public health restrictions). Screening locations are to be determined but are likely to include both traditional and non-traditional screening venues. The 2024 St Kilda Film Festival will be a hybrid event and it is likely that most of the content will be exclusively screened online.
• Utilise a portion of the entered film for promotional purposes such as the trailer.
• For selected films, exhibit the film for an extended period (the week following Closing Night) available for streaming in the Encore Showcase, which may be paywalled.

5. The Producer warrants to the St Kilda Film Festival that they have obtained all the necessary permissions to enter this film and that the film does not infringe the rights, including copyright, of any third party. This includes use of music and literary material.

6. All productions screened at 2024 St Kilda Film Festival must have been completed within 2 years of the entry closing date.

7. Entries cannot be withdrawn after Tuesday 1 March 2024. By submitting your film to the St Kilda Film Festival for consideration, you acknowledge this condition of entry and waive your right to withdraw your film from the Festival after this date.

8. If your film is selected for the Festival, you will be sent an email confirmation by Monday 28 March 2024.

9. The Festival strongly requests that selected films are removed from public viewing on other platforms for the duration of the Festival campaign. This does not apply to existing agreements with other Festivals and streaming platforms.

10. As part of the online presentation of the event, the St Kilda Film Festival will be expanding its reach to a national audience. We do advise that all online Festival content streams will be geo-blocked to viewers from outside Australia, and password protected so only available to online viewers within the context of the Festival.

11. The St Kilda Film Festival has a commitment to ensuring equitable participation and inclusion. The Festival offers film submission waivers for films where the Director and/or Producer identify as being:

•  First Peoples
•  A person with disability

12. Selected films will be required to provide sidecar closed caption files for their film (i.e. not embedded/burnt in) prior to screening. (n.b. Filmmakers can generate these files automatically via Adobe Premiere Pro Speech to Text).

13. The festival also requires that if selected, films should be supplied as both hi-resolution MPG4 (or pro-res or similar) and DCP for physical screenings. All files including DCPs should be formatted at 25fps.

14. Selection for screening: All submitted films will be assessed by an independent panel of eleven industry professionals, including alumni from the 2022 Festival and the Festival Director. This panel will shortlist the Top 100 Short Films, which will be screened at the 2023 St Kilda Film Festival.

15. Award selection: Shortlisted, award-eligible films will be judged, nominated, and awarded by a jury of three screen industry professionals independent of the Festival (the Festival Director is not included on the jury). Nominations will be publicly announced during the Festival, and Award Winners will be announced on Closing Night.

Australian co-production eligibility details must be detailed at the time of submission and the Festival has final decisions on eligibility. If you are unsure of eligibility, please contact the Festival office at filmfest@portphillip.vic.gov.au.

Premiere Requirements

No premiere requirement