Gone in 60 Seconds

In a culture where time is at a premium, the idea of The One Minute Film and Video Festival strikes a chord with audiences in a way that is both tangible and conceptual.

In an average day an average person spends about 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours working, 2 hours traveling and 3 hours of puttering around doing things like cleaning, cooking and putting on clothes. This leaves you about three hours of free time everyday.

To paraphrase the organizer's own explanation of the festival's success: you loved Lord of the Rings, but making something similar is going to eat up too much of your time. Based on the simple math above, you can barely find time to watch the damn thing. Of course, they know it's not simply a lack of options that makes the festival successful. What began as a joke 3 years ago has accidentally stumbled onto a new way of making cinema more accessible.

The potential of these films is comparable to that of your favourite commercial or music video. The danger is using these movies as an excuse to make something, but not something longer.

With more than 200 submissions from all over the world, the festival is a sea of punch-line comedies and pretty pictures. The films change fast enough to sustain the interest of even the most hyperactive of the ADD set and often surprise you with their cleverness and poignancy. As this festival grows, so will the number and quality of films that are submitted to it. It showed a lot of promise for what's going to come.

Here are a couple of my faves:

Anger Management Meeting
Ben Graham

Time Travel Trouble
Dane Boedigheimer

17
Florian Grolig