Blog: Film festivals

Our festival happens in London, UK, one of the world's most cosmopolitan cities, and screens short comedy films from around the globe. Our festival is held at the prestigious and lovely Hackney Picturehouse, home to many film premieres. We are proud to showcase, connect and promote talented comedy filmmakers from all over the world.

It is curated by WWCSFF Film Festivals which also produces the London-X4 Seasonal Short Film Festival and the Asia South East-Short Film Festival.

A US$100 Audience Favourite prize will go to the most popular film of the festival. Awards & Laurels will be available for the following categories:

– UK Comedy Short
– American Comedy Short
– European Comedy Short (including Ireland)
– Canadian Comedy Short
– Australasian Comedy Short
– African Comedy Short
– Asian Comedy Short
– Latin American Comedy Short
&
– Student Comedy Short
– Experimental Comedy Short
– Animated Comedy Short
– Music Video Comedy Short
– Shorter Comedy Short (under 2 minutes)
– Longer Comedy Short/ Web Series/Pilot (between 15 and 30 minutes)

Awards are judged by people involved in the comedy and film industry. In previous editions we were lucky to have on our panel:

-MATT TILLER (head of development for Comedy Central UK)
-MONA YOUSEFI (star of her own BBC show and comedy actor)
-TIM RENKOW (star of his own BBC show and stand up comedian)
-ALEXIS DUBUS (well known UK comedian)
-JOANNE LAU (part of the BBC Writersroom Comedy Room)

The Festival Directors have been involved in live and filmed comedy promotion, performance and production for over fifteen years.

Exciting, creative content is more important to us than slick production values. With comedy, if you make them laugh, audiences won't care if you filmed your masterpiece on your uncle the swinger's 1980s video camera.

London and the UK has a long, illustrious history of comedy from The Canterbury Tales to Monty Python. It is also a global centre for production companies and talent agencies that are looking for new talent to provide comedy content for the ever expanding market of online entertainment, digital content marketing and advertising. We have a database of these companies and agencies and update them about the talented filmmakers participating in our festival.

Most importantly though, the films we screen aim to entertain our festival audiences so we have some important criteria for the films we show:

GET TO THE FUNNY BITS QUICKLY.
BE ORIGINAL AND AVOID CLICHES.

"Brevity is the soul of wit" William Shakespeare
(and he knows better than us because he wore tights)

Being able to share great, undiscovered comedy films is a real buzz and delight for us and our festival is an essential calendar feature both for audiences wishing to have some great nights of laughter and for the discovery of new comedy creators.

All participants in our festival (if they wish) will have their contact details along with their film details made available to our industry database.