MAX3MIN Film Festival | 5th edition | May 2026 | Milan

Call for entries

Films completed after 1st January 2024 

Maximum running time 3’59” (credits excluded)

Opening: 30 September 2025

Regular deadline: 25 November 2025 - FREE

Late deadline: 31 December 2025 - 10 €

SUBMIT NOW ON FILMFREEWAY

Super short cinema is cinema. To all intents and purposes.

For a long time, critics attributed to extreme brevity a constant debt to forms deemed commercial, such as advertising or music videos or trailers. Today, hyper-shortness is intrinsic with the way we live. It is not commercial brevity that has won by distorting the cinema: it is the cinema that has found a dynamic suitable for the present day.

MAX3MIN, the festival of very short cinema, small but big enough to contain a world, is there, ready to be seduced by its possibilities and its ramblings.

MAX3MIN was created in 2021 with the intention of capturing a small but variegated photograph of this phenomenon. In these years, it searched in film schools but above all it searched for anyone who wanted to tell a story or a time or a suggestion in super-short times. From anywhere at all in the world.

The limit of 3 minutes became a stimulus for creativity, generating a fluid magma in which genres are shuffled and always take on new identities: the documentary merges with the meme, vertical cinema reclaims traditional fictionalized films, compilation films and protest movies contend with self-told stories from selfies.

The 5th edition of MAX3MIN Film Festival will be held in 2026 in Milan.

One single international competition, without any division by genre. Two days of screenings and three prizes to be awarded. One photographic exhibition, with photos from the films and backstage. Straight to the heart of cinema, in three minutes. The selection team pays particular attention to the geographical composition of the competition: MAX3MIN opens windows on to unconventional stories far from Western-centric narrations, to reflect as far as possible the heterogeneity of the films entered and the different national cultures of the various countries.

Awards & Prizes

MAX3MIN JURY PRIZE: the jury will choose the best short films and will award 3 prizes:

1° prize 2000 euros

2° prize 1000 euros

3° prize 500 euros

MAX3MIN AUDIENCE’S AWARD: the audience can express their preferences and proclaim their favourite short film.

The Festival Organizers reserve the right to establish new prizes which will be communicated to the participants on the website and through its channels of communication.