Six years ago this month, Tom and I launched FilmZee with two hundred films, forty invited members, a very basic web player, and no clear idea whether anyone outside our immediate network would care about a subscription archive dedicated entirely to short film. The answer, it turned out, was yes — slowly, then faster, then at a rate we hadn't expected. This post is an attempt to account for what we've learned.

What the catalog taught us about the form

The single most important thing we've learned from running the archive is that short film has a geography that doesn't map onto any of the existing hierarchies of cinema. The films that consistently generate the most discussion among our members, the films that get requested most often, the films that programmers come to us about — these are not the films that won the most prizes at the most prestigious festivals. They're the films that do something the form allows and nothing else does.

We have a recurring conversation at FilmZee about what we'd call the "density threshold" — the point at which a film becomes worth the twenty minutes of attention you give it. In a feature, the threshold is lower because you've already committed. You're there for ninety minutes regardless; the film has room to earn your attention gradually. In a short, the threshold is higher and it has to be met quickly, and the films that meet it tend to be films that are completely clear about what they are. Not simple — clear. There's a difference.

The clearest films in our catalog often have very little in common stylistically. They might be formally austere or formally elaborate; they might be personal essays or observational documentaries or fiction films; they might be four minutes or thirty-eight minutes. What they share is that every element in them is necessary, and you can feel that necessity while watching. Nothing is there to fill time or hedge against ambiguity or give the audience a place to rest. This is demanding to make. The films that achieve it are worth preserving.

The preservation problem, and what we've done about it

I've written elsewhere about the tracking project we ran in 2023, which followed forty award-winning shorts from 2015 and found that essentially none of them were in a stable archival state. This remains the thing I think about most in relation to what FilmZee is for.

In the six years we've been running, we've sourced and archived 2,800+ films. About 600 of those came from before widespread digital distribution and required active sourcing — broadcast digitisations, transfers from directors' personal VHS copies, prints from cinematheques that hadn't been converted. About 400 were films that had fallen off their original distribution platforms and would not have been findable without direct contact with the directors.

This is not a lot relative to the total output of the international short film circuit. The circuit produces thousands of films per year, and has been doing so for decades. We are not solving the preservation problem. What we are doing is making it somewhat less bad, in a specific area of the catalog, for the films that our members and our judgment suggest are worth the effort.

The principle we've applied consistently is: if a film screened at a major international festival and we can find no reliable way to watch it, that's a failure worth addressing. We can't address every instance of this failure. We try to address the ones we learn about.

The membership

In March 2019 we had forty members. We now have just over 2,100. The growth has been almost entirely word of mouth — we've never advertised, never done a PR campaign, never been on a platform that aggregates this kind of product. People find us because someone they trust told them we existed.

This has consequences for who the membership is. It skews heavily toward people who were already part of the short film world in some capacity — festival programmers, directors, critics, researchers, film students, cinematheque staff. About 30% of our members work in film professionally in some capacity. This was not intentional. It's a consequence of how we spread.

The benefit of this is that the community that has developed around the archive is genuinely expert. The forum discussions about specific films are substantive in a way that doesn't happen in most online film communities. When a member writes a note on a film in the archive, it's usually a note worth reading. The catalog request system — which is how a significant portion of our acquisitions are driven — produces requests that are specific and well-argued.

The cost is that we've probably not done enough to bring in people who aren't already embedded in the world of short film but would benefit from and contribute to the archive. This is something we want to work on in the next few years.

What we got wrong

A few things, honestly.

The annotation system in the first version of the platform was too rigid — it forced notes into a template that didn't work for all types of films, and some of the early annotations are thin as a result. We've been going back through the catalog to improve these, but it's slow work and there are still too many films with inadequate notes.

We underinvested in the pre-2000 section for the first three years. We had a sense that the membership was primarily interested in contemporary work, and that was partially true, but the researchers who came to us specifically for historical material were some of our most engaged users, and we should have prioritised that section earlier.

We should have launched the director interviews sooner. We started in 2021. We should have started in 2019. The interviews are now some of the most-read content on the platform, and the directors we've spoken to have consistently said that having an extended record of their thinking about their own work — not a press junket answer but a real conversation — matters to them. We lost two years of that.

Year seven

We're not announcing anything specific. We have plans for the platform that we'll describe when they're closer to done. What I can say is that the archive is going to keep getting larger and more complete, the annotations are going to keep improving, and the community is going to keep being the thing that makes it worth running.

If you're reading this and you're not a member: we don't do open registration, and we're not going to. But we do accept applications at join@filmzee.top, and we read all of them. If you care about short film, there's a good chance we'd like to have you here.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of this for the last six years. We made something that didn't exist before. That's not nothing.