The Festival Is No Longer the Gatekeeper

The event was called Let's Talk About (Short) Films! Pluralistic Discourse in Film Criticism. It was held at the Embassy of Canada on Potsdamer Platz, during Berlinale 2026. Already an odd place for this particular conversation — embassies don't usually host discussions about the erosion of the very power their guests represent.

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The premise was about decentralization. Film criticism isn't centralized anymore. There are no longer designated voices writing seriously about short films — no gatekeepers, nobody actively writing about short films, giving opinions, keeping records. Anyone can review anything on Letterboxd, IMDb, a personal blog. The people convened to discuss this were the ones who still consider themselves the gatekeepers: Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck, head of Berlinale Shorts. A programmer from Filmfest Dresden. Catherine Colas from ARTE Kurzschluss — one of the few places in Europe that still pays real money to acquire short films. And Niels Putman, who just founded yanco, a platform that streams and curates short films from the festival circuit.

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They talked about distribution. About canon-building — Putman's platform had just released a list of the 250 most important short films in history, assembled from a network of programmers and academics and filmmakers. A canon as counterweight to algorithmic chaos. A way of saying: these films matter, and we are the ones saying so.

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I was sitting in the audience listening to all of this.

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The Question

Someone from the audience asked a question. A simple one, almost too simple: do any of you ever watch short films that are successful online but have never been near a festival? YouTube films, Vimeo films, films that found an audience without submitting to anything?

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All four panelists said no.

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Not defensively. Candidly. Henckel-Donnersmarck said she operates entirely within the festival ecosystem — every film she programs, every film she watches, everything comes through the submission pipeline. The Dresden programmer said the same. Colas confirmed it for ARTE: Kurzschluss acquisitions come through the circuit. And Putman — who has just built a platform supposedly curating the best short films in the world — admitted that everything on it comes from festivals. He has no interest in looking anywhere else. His entire operation is based on trusting what other curators have already filtered.

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Which means: the system is a closed loop. A festival programmer trusts festival-submitted films. A curation platform trusts festival-selected films. A broadcaster trusts platform-selected films. Each layer faces the same direction. Anything that doesn't enter through the right door simply doesn't exist — not because it isn't good, but because nobody has the bandwidth, or apparently the desire, to go looking.

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I only found out afterward that the person who asked the question was Scott Roxborough, European bureau chief of The Hollywood Reporter. In the moment it just felt like a voice from the room. Which is actually how it should feel — because it wasn't a provocateur's question. It was the obvious question. The one that was sitting there waiting to be asked.

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He Just Said No

Then Henckel-Donnersmarck said something that changed the temperature.

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She described a filmmaker — who puts everything he makes directly on YouTube. No festival submissions. No gatekeepers. Millions of views. People waiting for his next film the way they used to wait for a premiere.

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She reached out to him. Offered to program his next film at Berlinale Shorts instead of him posting it online.

He said no.

He just said no.

One of the most powerful short film programmers in the world — a platform that qualifies films for the Oscars, that can open every door on the global circuit — and this filmmaker looked at that and said: I'm good.

Because he had something she couldn't offer. A direct relationship with an audience he built himself, on his own terms, without asking anyone's permission.

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What This Actually Was

The panel was billed as a conversation about the decentralization of film criticism. But decentralized criticism is just a symptom. The underlying condition is decentralized power.

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For most of the history of short film, festivals had one specific and absolute power: first contact. If no festival showed your film, your film did not exist in any meaningful public sense. The festival wasn't just a venue. It was the condition of visibility itself.

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That's gone now. There's a highway that goes straight around the festival world. Filmmakers build their own audiences. They make things and put them online without giving a damn about any festival or museum or programmer — straight to the audience. And some of them find more reach, more expression, more self-sufficiency than the festival circuit ever offered.

The institution senses this. That's why these people are gathering at embassies to talk about it. That's why a 250-film canon gets assembled — not just as scholarship, but as an assertion of continued relevance. We are still the ones who determine what matters.

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You don't even need to wait for AI to replace you. Just the fact that anyone can make something and put it online — that already replaces you. People can find whatever they want. The curation monopoly is over.

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A Moment of Clarity

This wasn't an epiphany. I already knew all of this. YouTube filmmakers building audiences outside the festival world — not news. The self-referential loop of the festival ecosystem — also not news.

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What I hadn't seen before was the people inside the institution saying it themselves. Sitting on a stage, not defensively, not in denial — with a kind of honest helplessness. An acknowledgment that the world shifted around them and they're still working out what their role is now.

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That's what made it a moment of clarity. Not revelation. Admission.

The festival still matters. I submit to festivals. I care about those conversations. A Berlinale Golden Bear for a short film still means something that no view count can replicate. I'm not arguing the old system is finished.

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But the filmmaker who said no understood something. He built his own way in.

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That's the picture right now. Not a collapse. A bifurcation. Two roads, going to different places. The question of which one to walk — or whether you can walk both — is the defining strategic question for short filmmakers right now.

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I know this from my own experience. My film The Invention of Chris Marker never went near a festival. I posted it on YouTube, shared it in forums, reached out directly to kinos in Berlin. The film found its audience that way — and then, afterward, it was screened at the Sorbonne in Paris, at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in Berlin cinemas. The institutional recognition came after the audience did. Not before. That's not how the system is supposed to work. But it's how it worked.

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And the institution is only beginning to take it seriously.