Where the idea came from
Lena spent most of her twenties as a programmer at short film festivals — first at a regional festival in the Netherlands, then as a shorts selector at IDFA from 2014 to 2018. In that time she watched somewhere between four and five thousand short films, kept detailed notes on the ones that mattered, and watched most of the good ones become effectively inaccessible within a few years of their festival run. Vimeo links broke. YouTube accounts closed. Films won awards and then vanished.
Tom was working as a software developer and studying film part-time. He'd been building small tools for tracking films he watched — nothing fancy, just a local database with notes and links. He kept running into the same problem: no good source of truth for short film that included director credits, production context, and reliable archive copies. IMDB had partial data and no video. YouTube had video and no curation. Vimeo had both but nothing stayed up.
They met through a shared friend at a Rotterdam screening in January 2019 and realised within about twenty minutes of conversation that they were trying to solve the same problem from opposite ends. By March they'd agreed to build something together. By December there were two hundred films in the archive and forty members who'd been invited in through word of mouth.
What we built
The structure was always the same: every film in the archive has a director page, a festival history, a quality note on the source, and a short curatorial annotation explaining why it's worth watching. We didn't invent that approach — it's just how you treat something seriously. Liner notes have done this for records for seventy years.
What we added over time: a member forum for discussions and requests; a pre-digital archive section for films from before 1995 that we'd sourced from tape transfers and print digitisations; and a director interview series that's produced twenty-three long-form written conversations since 2021, all exclusive to FilmZee.
We kept membership invitation-only throughout. This has occasionally frustrated people. Our reasoning is simple: the archive's quality depends on the community contributing to it — submitting requests, writing notes, flagging errors, bringing material we don't have. That works better with people who chose to be here than with an open registration funnel.
Who we are
Former shorts programmer at IDFA (2014–2018). Runs curatorial direction, member communications, and the director interview programme. Writes occasionally for Filmkrant. Based in Amsterdam.
Software developer and part-time film student. Runs the technical infrastructure, video quality standards, and pre-digital acquisition programme. Based in Amsterdam.
We're two people with a volunteer contributor network of about fifteen active members who help with annotation, translation, and archive sourcing. We've never taken investment. We have no plans to grow beyond what the archive quality can support.
Questions, submissions, press enquiries: hello@filmzee.top.