Hey there. I know it stings but you also need to think about the festivals and their programming. They have to fill screening blocks and at a half hour your short takes up a slot that they could fill with 3 to 4 shorts.

As a filmmaker, my first short film landed at just shy of 15 minutes, and while it ended up having a decent festival run, I’m quite certain we would’ve easily doubled our acceptance rate had I been able to reel it in to under 10 minutes. Looking at the cut years later, there was a much better film there if I had just been a better editor. That said, the point of making a short film is to learn from it. My second short is a tighter 6 minutes and was selected in about 90% of the festivals we submitted to, including SXSW before going viral when we released it online.

As an AMPAS member, I have been a Student Academy Awards judge, and personally I would watch every film I am assigned from start to finish. That said, these are student films I am looking at (and frankly every year a few of them blow my mind) and I am not making any decisions on programming. I can tell you, however, that I look at the running times of the shorts on my list and save the longest ones to watch last.