Super-short cinema is cinema

To all intents and purposes, and it no longer has any complex in relation to the rest.

MAX3MIN Film Festival
5th edition, 2026 Milan
Call for entries

Opening: 30 September 2025
Regular deadline: 3 November 2025 - FREE
Late deadline: 9 December 2025 - 10 €

For a long time, critics attributed to extreme brevity a constant debt to forms deemed adjacent but very distinct from cinema, as they were deemed purely instrumental or objects of commercial promotion. As though advertising or music videos or trailers, in their shortness, required by channels that need short times, had soiled the cinematographic essence of the short film itself. 

Today we are going through another geological age. 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.

Super-short and super-long are radicalisms of the present time; if blockbuster cinema tends to be long because the platforms ask the viewer for engagement time, reels and stories for the social media incorporate forms and languages of 20th century cinema, mashing them up and readapting them to the contemporary attention deficit. AI, perhaps, will be the completion of this process of resurrection of 20th century cinema as a collective pattern to be reinterpreted. 

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.

All this can be described, segmented and categorized, but no category can keep up with the present time, which feeds and devours and eats up again and regenerates at every trend. And it is super-short.

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

One single international competition, without any division by genre. One single day of screenings and 3 prizes to be awarded. One photographic exhibition, with photos from the films and backstage. Straight to the heart of cinema, in three minutes.

All information and rules can be found at www.max3min.com