MUBI Blog

For this year’s Festival de Cannes we once again teamed up with Cisco for Cannes à la Flip—a contest challenging Short Film Corner directors to shoot a short film while attending the 2010 festival.

We started Stage One of the competition a couple weeks before the Festival by inviting the 1,800 Short Film Corner filmmakers to submit a pitch for a short film. The three caveats for their short film idea being: 1. It had to be shot wholly on a Flip Video camcorder; 2. It had to be shot during and around the Cannes Film Festival; and 3. The maximum length of the short could only be three minutes.

For Stage Two we picked the 300 best pitches and gave each filmmaker a Flip Ultra HD to not only use for making their film, but to also keep after the competition. Our booth was set-up for the duration of the Festival in the Short Film Corner of the Palais des Festivals building so that we could hand out the Flip Video camcorders directly to the filmmakers.

Depending on when the filmmaker picked up their Flip Video camcorder, they had anywhere from one to six days to complete their short film and have it uploaded to our competition site. It was pretty amazing to see these various filmmakers around the Palais shooting, or Flipping, scenes for their movie. Filmmaking and film watching was happening all around.

As the submissions began to roll in we saw a diverse mix of experimental and narrative work that pushed the boundaries of what one could accomplish with a 4” x 2” camera. Some were character driven, some extremely avant-garde, some heavy with CGI effects work while others tackled the Flip Video camcorder aesthetic head-on.

Stage Three of the competition kicked off the morning after the deadline as a select jury—composed of film festival directors, distributors and our very own Danny Kasman—got together at the Celluloid Dreams office in Cannes to view and vote on the top three films.

A few hours later our CEO, Efe Cakarel, got in front of a packed house of hopeful winners.

Drum roll.

First Place: Kiteling by Eva Pervolovici who receivies €3,000 and a meeting with Hengameh Panahi, President of Celluloid Dreams; Second Place: One Night Avec La Mer by Colin L. Racicot who receives €1,000; and in Third Place: Youth by Ayse Altinok who receives €500.

View the three winning short films embedded below:

1. Kiteling by Eva Pervolovici

2. One Night Avec La Mer by Colin L. Racicot

3. Youth by Ayse Altinok

You can view all the submissions at our Cannes à la Flip project page.

Photos: Fabrizio Maltese / fabriziomaltese.com