Celebrating three decades of shorts, the 30th Aspen Shortsfest is Oscar®-qualifying in the three categories of animation, documentary and live-action narrative film. This year’s Shortsfest features filmmakers exploring unique and timely themes in the festival’s five categories: Animation, Comedy, Documentary, Drama and Short Short. The 2021 slate of films features 6 world premieres, 3 international premieres, 7 North American premieres and 15 U.S. premieres from filmmakers representing 28 countries and 6 continents. Almost 3,000 films were submitted for consideration with 80 selected for this year’s virtual event. 55 films are directed or co-directed by women, accounting for 69% of the program.
*Please Note - The interactive Aspen map and Virtual spaces shown below are part of our Filmocracy Platform.
Clicking these links will direct you OUTSIDE of Eventive & requires different login credentials to access.
Aspen Film partner Eventive will be hosting the festival’s 2021 film & Livestream Q&A viewing platform. Festival goers will have the option to view films on their computers or devices, as well as on their Smart TV’s via the Eventive App for Roku, Apple TV or Chromecast. Nightly live Q&As with Shortsfest filmmakers will take place on Eventive and be available to all festival ticket or passholders.
To further augment the virtual experience, Aspen Film is partnering with Filmocracy to provide an engaging and interactive experience for filmmakers and festival-goers alike. VIP and Full Virtual Passholders will be able to “enter” iconic downtown Aspen Buildings to engage in daily Sip & Chat Industry Conversation & Mingling Sessions. A virtual map of Aspen will feature the following events spaces: The virtual Aspen Art Museum that will be the social space for the nightly Sip & Chat sessions; the virtual Hotel Jerome will serve as the virtual Filmmaker Lounge; the virtual Red Brick Center for the Arts hosting the Education Hub, and the virtual Wheeler Opera House that will be the portal to enter the festival’s Eventive screening platform.
This year’s jury includes Shortsfest alum Meryam Joobeur, the Tunisian-American director who received an Oscar®-nomination for Best Live Action Short Film for Brotherhood; United Talent Agency agent Keya Khayatian; and Rachel Rosen, a San Francisco Bay Area-based independent film programmer and awards consultant who is currently a member of the selection committee for The New York Film Festival.
As part of this year’s festival Industry Program, a series of virtual panels will be featured throughout Shortsfest including a RED Digital Cinema camera panel – Intro to the RED Arsenal presented by RED’s James Lucarelli and The Role of Sound Design presented by Dolby’s Glenn Kiser, along with a panel about the dramatic growth of virtual cinema, presented by Eventive co-founder Iddo Patt.
Industry special guests for 2021 also include curator Opal Hope Bennett, who recently became the Shorts Producer for POV as well as the Director of Filmmaker Development for DOCNYC; Inga Diev, General Manager of Ouat Media, the Toronto-based international sales and distribution company specializing in short films; Sudeep Sharma, a programmer for the Sundance Film Festival with a focus on documentary feature films and Co-Director of Programming for the Palm Springs International ShortFest; and Diana Williams, an award-winning producer and co-founder of Kinetic Energy Entertainment.
Shortsfest Programming Director Jason Anderson will host an in-depth conversation with award-winning filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green on the evening of Saturday, April 10. Green is a Shortsfest alum whose first feature, Monsters & Men, won the Special Dramatic Jury Prize at Sundance in 2018. His second feature Joe Bell was written by Oscar®-winning screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry and stars Mark Wahlberg, Reid Miller, Connie Britton, Maxwell Jenkins, and Gary Sinise. The film is scheduled for release later this year, as is his recently wrapped third feature King Richard, a biographical drama for Warner Brothers starring Will Smith as Richard Williams, father and coach to Venus and Serena Williams. Green’s next project will be the highly anticipated untitled Bob Marley biopic for Paramount Pictures.
EDUCATION
Again at Shortsfest, Aspen Film’s FilmEducates is providing interactive, online educational opportunities to schools throughout Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley and beyond. Their beloved programs - Filmmakers to the Classroom, Young Filmmaker Labs, and Making Movies Matter - will now be hosted completely online as filmmakers join virtual classrooms to screen their films presented at this year’s festival and engage with students. The FilmEducates Youth Jury will meet daily via Zoom to vote on the coveted Youth Jury Award presented during the festival’s award event.
