Filmfest Dresden - International Short Film Festival

Focusing on Short Film
Focusing on short films, the festival promotes a film category which is mostly disregarded by cinemas and television. Since its beginning in 1989, Filmfest Dresden has developed into one of the major short film festivals in Germany - and with a total amount of € 60,000 prize money into the best funded short film festival across Europe.

Programme Structure
The festival´s programme reflects the manyfold aspects of this genre and includes short animated and fiction films as well as documentary and experimental films.

The main sections of the festival are the International and the National Competitions. These are accompanied by various other thematic events. Visitors, the press and film producers also use the festival as a meeting place and to exchange opinions and discuss new ideas. An annual highlight in the Dresden cultural calendar, Filmfest Dresden is especially popular with local film audiences – 21,000 people visited the 20th Filmfest Dresden in 2008.

Our Roots
The festival was already an established event before the fall of the Berlin Wall in the year 1989. The first festivals showed films which had either been previously banned or which had rarely been screened before. After a few years, a new focus was required. The animation film industry could already look back on a lengthy tradition in Dresden. After all, Dresden was the home of the "DEFA Trickfilmstudio", founded in 1955. That was one of the reasons why the festival initiators decided to focus on animation and short films. Following the introduction of the International Competition in 1992 and the National Competition on the 10th anniversary of the festival in 1998, Filmfest Dresden has developed into one of the major short film festivals in Germany.