The Victoria Short Film Festival

The Victoria International Short Film Festival (VicShorts) is an exhibition of artistic film and video work. Exhibited in Victoria, BC, the festival aims to celebrate a growing community of film and video artists through featuring pieces of work from the island and from abroad. Founded in 2018, this festival supports independent and creative filmmaking and video work by bringing artists together, showing diverse work, and holding space for an exploration of short film and video art as an artistic and multi-dimensional medium. We focus on short films for their capacity to capture a feeling, a moment, an idea, and we challenge our submitters to truly take advantage of this medium to impact their viewers. The Victoria Short Film Festival is pleased to include video art works which broaden visual culture through the medium of video and moving image. We encourage artists to submit experimental, video-based works including sound, film, performance, installation, and new media for exhibition in the festival. We see an artistic renaissance occurring in Victoria, and we strive to foster Vancouver Island as a haven for boundary pushing filmmaking. This festival is about strengthening the Local, National and International Filmmaker and video artist Communities, with Victoria as an emerging hub. This festival takes place on unceded and occupied Coast Salish territiories, specifically of the Lekwungen and W_SÁNEC speaking peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations. The festival takes place in September 2019 and will feature an evening of film screenings followed by a video art exhibition In 2019 we will continue to ask the question: When does film fall into the category of Art? We will be curating a substantially more diverse and broad group of films this year. Specifically, with short films, we will celebrate work that make the most of the medium of a short: using it to explore attention, abstraction, ideas, emotions, stories, and so on. We are excited to represent the work of emerging filmmakers and works from underrepresented communities. The Victoria International Short Film Festival recognizes the dynamics of power and privilege that exist in our social, political, and economic landscape and will prioritize the inclusion of works from self-identified artists and filmmakers belonging to historically disadvantaged groups.