To mark the Short Film Symposium at this year's Cork Film Festival, Cecilia McAllister examines the art of the short film in its various manifestations, and notes some particularly successful examples of the short form.

Twenty years ago the very act of getting a short film made meant something. Agents and producers would watch it and it gave you some profile. Today it's a different story. With the proliferation of film schools and the accessibility of digital technology your grandmother could quite literally go out and shoot her own short – and might have. When you add to that the thousands of film festivals that show shorts in and out of competition, making a short that gets noticed seems like an impossible task. But for directors aspiring to make a feature film, short films are still the obvious 'calling card' to display one's artistic, technical, and storytelling skills in the cinematic arena.

Finding great shorts
Everyone wants to make a great short and every year there are those shorts that are head and shoulders above the others. This year the Cork Film Festival has taken on the task of finding the best 100 shorts ever made. They have called for the public to make nominations, and the selection will be shown at this year's festival. It's a mammoth task, and no doubt there will [?] in some discussion about which have been included and, more importantly, which have been excluded.

This leads to the question: What makes a great short? To answer this you first must define what short films are. Apart from the issue of length, how short films are distinct from feature films; furthermore, how are shorts selected for funding? Often the goals of the filmmaker can be different from the objectives of the funders. How short films are selected for festivals; and how do they ultimately win awards?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 106.