When OFF18 – Odense International Film Festival – kicks off in August, you will find a brand new competition. Short documentaries are given a special place in this year’s festival programme, its own jury and two new awards.

While the documentaries always have been welcome in the Main Competition at OFF, the programmes has always been carried by fiction and animation. At this years festival in Odense, OFF will bring the short documentary into the light, and fully focus on its intense and challenging genre. In addition, it will have two new awards: Best Documentary Short and The Soapbox Award. The awards will be given by the competition’s own expert jury, who will consist of three competent film professionals.

While the award for Best Documentary Short goes to the best in the category, The Soapbox Award will be given to the documentary, which has used its platform best to portray a new important subject or point of view, or to shed new light on an existing discussion. Along with the Best Documentary Short award, this brings us up to a total of 13 awards, which will be celebrated at the OFF Awards, which takes place Saturday night during the festival.

Festival Director Birgitte Weinberger comments:

 “The short documentary is a wildly intimate format, where we as viewers are introduced to parts of reality, which we rarely (or never) are presented with otherwise. In 15 minutes, we can visit places in the world, we did not think existed, personalities we could not imagine, or just experience an excerpt of life as it may look. The long documentary most know from television, but the short documentary is an unknown to many. It has always been present at the festival, but it deserves its own place, and from now on, it will have that place. I am really looking forward to presenting even more powerful and relevant stories from the real world at OFF.”

More documentary films to OFF

In 2017, OFF received over 2500 short films, of which a few hundred were documentary films. Out of these, 7 short documentaries qualified for the competition. By giving the short documentary a special place in the programme at Odense International Film Festival and introducing two new prizes, the hope is that even more short documentary films of high quality will find their way to the festival and help to create even more attention to the short documentary subject.

Registration of a movie for the competition will open on January 15, 2018 with deadline 1 April 2018. OFF will receive movies in all genres with a maximum of 30 minutes, if produced completely in the year of 2017 or 2018.

See more about signing up at: www.filmfreeway.com/odenseinternationalfilmfestival

The Odense International Film Festival has existed since 1975 and is Denmark’s oldest and only Oscar-qualifying film festival.