The long & short of short films

Swati Rai

There is a surge of interest in short films — matching up to the modern-day viewers with shorter attention spans. Shorts TV, which was recently launched in India, is touted as the next big thing in  movie-watching experience. The channel was started as a curated movie platform in Europe in 2008.

No movie played on the channel is longer than 40 minutes and there are also the ones ranging from two minutes to 15 minutes. 

“We pulled together a large catalogue of short films and started putting these on iTunes and other platforms and decided if we curated these in the right way, we might be able to give viewers an experience like a film festival every time they watch the channel,” says Carter Pilcher, Shorts International chief executive and member of the academy.  “It’s a multi-platform experience. We’ve launched on Tata Sky with a linear channel that is a curated experience. You can find hundreds of short films with different taglines that say shorts and you can pick out any you want to watch,” he adds.

ShortsTV has been showing Oscar-nominated short films in theatres in America for the past 14 years. The channel provides access to handpicked Oscar-nominated films. In addition to international films, there is also a special section ‘Indian Stories,’ which have been collected from the Indian subcontinent.