No less than 814 short films with total running time of 185 hours were submitted. The films came from 68 countries. They are mostly from the US, UK and Croatia, but we are happy to see quite a lot of them from the countries with less known productions such as Trinidad and Tobago, Nigeria, Moldova, Kuwait and Andorra. There were also many entries from this region and from the entire Europe because, for the first time, Motovun Film Festival has become a stepping-stone for nominations for the European Film Academy (EFA) Awards. The programmers, Andrej Korovljev and Inja Korać, are now in for some real hard work: Theirs is to watch all the films submitted and select 25 best ones which are to be shown on Motovun Film Hill between 23-27 July. The winner will be selected by the festival jury. This year, the jury will also include the programmers of MFF’s four partner festivals for the EFA Award. They will also select the best film by a European director to be nominated for the “European Oscar”. One of the partner festivals is Vis Vienna Shorts. This very weekend, Motovun Film Festival is curating its Triangle partner program and our programmer Inja Korać is a member of the festival short film jury.

Immediately upon their return, Inja and Andrej will get down on selecting the best entries. Eligible for showing at MFF are the films with running time up to 20 minutes that premiered after 1 January 2018 and had never been shown in Croatia before. As it didn’t take us long to notice a substantial increase in the quality of the films submitted, the decision on 25 best entries – to be announced on 1 July – will be a very tough one.