“While the film industry may have seemed stuck in freeze frame during the COVID pandemic, filmmakers did not allow the virus to get in the way of producing short films. That may explain why the Palm Springs International ShortFest received more than 5,500 submissions for the 27th annual edition, which runs June 22-28 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center.
“We were not really sure going into the submissions process, whether the pandemic was going to have a really negative impact on our submission numbers, whether that was going to lower the number of films being made in general, if that was going to hurt people’s ability to pay submission fees,” says Sudeep Sharma, co-director of programming at ShortFest. “But it really didn’t end up being that way. And we were really lucky and pleasantly surprised to see that so many people were still interested in submitting their work to us and sharing their films with us.”

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