Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen

Founded in 1954, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is one of the major international crossroads for the short form, unique in the range of forms and genres it presents to the public, and particularly well known for its spotlight on experimentation. The festival has never lost its enthusiasm for new cinematographies and borderline areas of cinematic experience. Oberhausen has always remained a place where new discussions and developments are launched. Today, it is the leading festival worldwide in the border zone between art and film.

In the course of more than six decades, filmmakers and artists ranging from Roman Polanski to Cate Shortland, from George Lucas and Martin Scorsese to Pipilotti Rist and Eija-Liisa Ahtila, have presented their first works in Oberhausen. In addition to its five competition sections, Oberhausen is known for its strong line of thematic programmes such as “The Third Image – Space and Time in 3D Cinema” (2015), “El pueblo – Searching for contemporary Latin America” (2016) or “Social Media Before the Internet” (2017).

The festival also operates a well-stocked Video Library, a non-commercial short film distribution branch and a unique archive of short films from more than 60 years of festival history.

In 2017 the festival received almost 7,000 competition submissions from nearly 100 countries. The festival screened more than 500 films and registered around 1,000 accreditations and ca. 17,000 entries.