Pragueshorts Film Festival Reveals the National Competition Selection

The Pragueshorts International Short Film festival has unveiled the programme of its National Competition. This year’s selection features a diverse mix of fifteen short films spanning fiction, documentary, and animation. Several films will make their world premiere at the festival, the program also includes works already chosen for prestigious international festivals. Among them are Hurikán by Jan Saska, set to screen at Sundance, and Julie Černá's Stone of Destiny, which will appear at the upcoming Berlinale. Animated film Weeds, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is heading to Pragueshorts, as well as I Died in Irpin, which premiered at Annecy. The 19th edition of Pragueshorts will run from 26 February to 2 March in Prague’s cinemas Světozor, Bio Oko, Ponrepo, and Kino Pilotů. From 2 to 23 March, the festival will continue online on the KVIFF.TV streaming platform. The full Pragueshorts programme will be published in early February.

"Since last year, the National Competition has expanded to include documentary and animated films alongside live-action films. This change reflects the growing genre and formal diversity of contemporary domestic short films. This year, the audience can look forward to five live-action films and five animated films, three documentaries–two of which are animated–and two films that combine different techniques and genres, including a work that creatively processes archival photographs using artificial intelligence," says Radka Weiserová, the organiser of the Pragueshorts festival. “Nearly 130 submissions were considered for the National Competition this year. Another interesting statistic is the number of films by women directors – who stand behind two-thirds of the selected films,” Weiserová said.

This year, the Pragueshorts festival will once again have three competition sections - in addition to the National Competition, there will also be the International Competition and the LABO Competition, focused on experimental works. The competition sections will be complemented by the popular live moderated Brutal Relax Show, special screenings for children and other thematic screenings. The full programme will be announced in the first half of February.