Focus on Ukraine: The politics of curating short film and creating a global community

Founded in 1997, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur is Switzerland’s largest and most important short film festival. It is also one of the most renowned events of its kind worldwide, whose prize winners qualify for prestigious awards consideration, including for Oscar, BAFTA and European film awards. With roughly 17,000 visitors and 800 accredited industry guests, it is a popular festival for the cinephile audience as well as an important hub for the domestic and international short film scene, and it offers a wide range of training and networking opportunities geared specifically towards short film professionals. This article outlines how the festival posits that the short film can be viewed politically, as a way to build an international community of filmmakers, curators and audiences. Taking the festival’s longstanding ties with Ukrainian filmmakers as an illustrative example, the authors delineate how curating short film is a practice of caring for cinema and communities.