Of our four competitive categories, the experimental award is the one filmmakers most often hesitate to enter — and the one we would least like to lose. With the ninth edition open for submissions, it is worth saying clearly what this category is for and who should be sending work to it.
Not a category for failure
There is a lingering suspicion that "experimental" is where a festival files the films that did not quite work as anything else — the narrative that lost its story, the documentary that lost its subject. We want to correct that. At Inte, the experimental category is not a consolation shelf. It is where we celebrate films that set out, deliberately, to do something the other categories cannot contain.
The 8th Edition's experimental winner, Alaleh Izadi's Refraction, was not a fiction that failed to cohere or a documentary that lost its nerve. It was a film that used the medium itself — light, duration, the grain of the image — as its subject. It could not have been made in any other category because it was about the things the other categories take for granted.
Experimental is not the shelf for films that didn't work. It is where the medium itself becomes the subject.
What we are actually looking for
We are looking for intention. Experimental film is easy to fake and impossible to fake well. An audience — and certainly a jury that watches a great deal of it — can tell within a minute whether a film's strangeness is doing work or merely decorating. We want the former. We want films where the unconventional choice is the necessary choice, where the form is inseparable from whatever the film is reaching for.
That can take many shapes. We have programmed:
- Films built from found and archival footage, reassembled into new meaning.
- Work with no narrative and no commentary, structured entirely by rhythm and image.
- Pieces that treat sound as the primary material and the picture as accompaniment.
- Hybrid films that refuse to sit still inside fiction or documentary.
None of these is a formula. If anything, the fastest way to lose us is to imitate a previous winner. The experimental category rewards the film that could not have been predicted from the ones before it.
A word to the hesitant
If you have made something you are not sure how to categorise — something that does not behave, that you suspect is "too much" for a festival — this is your category, and this is your invitation. The experimental award exists precisely for the films their makers were unsure anyone would programme. Send us the one that scares you a little.
Every category at Inte Cinema Festival welcomes bold, uncategorisable work. The category winner receives a trophy and $1,000. Submit on FilmFreeway before the late deadline of 31 May 2027.
Inte Cinema Festival is an independent short film festival and cultural association based in Rome. Submissions for the 9th Edition are open now on FilmFreeway.