In the spring of 2023 I started tracking forty short films that won awards at major festivals in 2015. I chose 2015 because it was far enough back that the films had finished their circuit — typically two to three years — and close enough that the directors were still active and could be contacted. The question I wanted to answer was simple: can you find these films? Can you watch them?

The results, compiled over about eight months, were worse than I expected.

The dataset

Forty films. Award-winners — not just festival selections, but films that won prizes — at Clermont-Ferrand, IDFA, Rotterdam, Sundance, Oberhausen, and the Cannes Palme d'Or for short film. Films that, at the time they screened, were discussed, reviewed, nominated for further awards in some cases. Films whose directors received offers and commissions on the basis of their success.

Of the forty:

  • 9 were freely and reliably available online as of mid-2023 (Vimeo with active director account, dedicated distributor page, or similar).
  • 11 were available but difficult to find — dead Vimeo links that redirected, embedded players on festival sites that no longer worked, YouTube uploads with private settings.
  • 14 were technically available through a distributor but required emailing someone and waiting, which in practice means they're not available for most purposes.
  • 6 I could only find on pirated platforms or informal file-sharing networks.
  • 0 were in a stable, high-quality archive that I could recommend to a researcher without qualification.

That last figure is the one that stayed with me. Zero. Of forty films that won awards at some of the most prestigious short film festivals in the world in a single year — films that critics had written about, that programmers had fought to screen, that directors had built careers on — not one was in a state that I'd call archivally stable.

Where the films go

The circuit for a successful short film works roughly like this. The film premieres at a major festival. It then travels for one to two years, typically to 15-40 festivals depending on its success, picking up additional prizes, reviews, and attention along the way. During this period the director maintains a Vimeo account with a password-protected version for festival screeners. The film is not publicly available.

After the circuit ends, there are a few options. The director can release the film publicly on Vimeo or YouTube. A distributor (Shorts International, Mubi, a national broadcaster) might acquire it. It might be submitted to archive organisations. It might simply sit on the director's hard drive, intended for release but never quite getting there.

Most films — the data strongly suggests — end up in that last category. Not permanently lost, not deliberately withheld, just not quite released. The director moves on to the next project. The Vimeo account lapses or gets rationalised. The festival website that hosted the only surviving embed gets redesigned. The film disappears.

The Vimeo problem

Eleven of my forty films had been on Vimeo at some point and were no longer accessible. In most cases, this wasn't Vimeo's fault — the account had been deleted or downgraded, and Vimeo had removed the videos in accordance with their terms of service. In two cases the director had deliberately taken the film down when it was acquired for streaming, and the streaming acquisition had since lapsed without anyone returning rights to the director. The films existed in a contractual limbo.

This is a structural problem, not a personal failing of any individual filmmaker. Short film directors don't have agents managing their back catalogs. They don't have lawyers reviewing contract terms about what happens when a streaming deal expires. They make a film, show it at festivals, and then move on. The administrative apparatus that would preserve the film simply doesn't exist at this budget level.

The distribution gap

There is no equivalent, for short film, of the infrastructure that preserves features. Features have theatrical distributors, home video deals, streaming licenses, national film institutes with active preservation mandates, cinematheques. The path from a successful feature to a preserved copy in a stable archive is imperfect but it exists.

For short film, the equivalent path is much shorter and much less reliable. Festival archives often only hold the screener copy, not a preservation-quality master. National film institutes vary enormously in how seriously they take short film preservation — some are excellent, many are not. The major streaming platforms (Mubi, OVID) have curated short film sections but they're small relative to the total output of the circuit and they focus on current work rather than preservation.

The result is that short film preservation depends, in practice, on individual directors maintaining their own files and either keeping their Vimeo accounts active or giving their films to someone who will. For most directors, this is not a priority. They have new work to make.

What we're doing about it

When I finished the tracking project in late 2023, I brought the results to Tom and we decided to try to do something about the films in our dataset specifically. We contacted all forty directors — or, where that wasn't possible, the producers or institutions associated with the film. Thirty-one responded. Of those, twenty-two gave us permission to archive the film. Of those twenty-two, seventeen were able to provide a file that met our minimum quality standards.

Seventeen films that would otherwise have remained inaccessible are now in the archive. That's the good news. The less good news is that this represents about a week and a half of full-time work from two people, applied to forty films from a single year. There are thirty-plus years of festival circuit output sitting in the same precarious state.

We can't fix that alone. What we can do is keep trying to source films that are at risk of being lost, and make that sourcing easy for directors who want their work preserved. If you made a short film that has fallen off the internet and you want it to have a stable home, write to us. That offer is genuine and it doesn't require you to be a member.