Experimental Film Festival Portland 2012
May 21-27, 2012, Portland, Oregon
Deadline February 15 2012

EFF Portland is looking for experimental shorts to feature in its first annual festival slated for May 2012 in Portland, or If you have a work that breaks form, challenges narrative convention or forces us to reinterpret our definition of cinema, we’re interested.

If you are not sure what experimental means, take out a piece of paper and pen or pencil, and begin scribbling or scratching in a manner that you may never have tried before. Close your eyes and think of nothing. Create a new language or attempt to revive one you heard in your distant memory. Overlap shapes to create new shapes. Maybe sing aloud while doing this or rhythmically hop from one foot to the other. You get the drift.

We are looking for short experimental film and video works under 15 minutes. If you have a longer film you feel we should consider, please contact us at [email protected].

Download the Submission Form

Vimeo, the video-hosting service, has opened submissions for their second Vimeo Festival and Awards, which "celebrates the most creative and original videos online and the individuals that make them". Vimeo will award grants of $5,000 to all of the category winners as well as awarding a grant of $25,000 for the Grand Prize winner. There are 13 different categories, each of them to be judged separately, including categories for experimental and lyrical films (click on the links for a description and criteria of each category). An independent jury will judge the entries, which will include the category winners from last edition as well as two industry experts per category. Submissions are open until next February 20, 2012.

You can read a small interview to Jeremy Boxer, director of the festival, in the DINCA blog.

Urban Research 2012: Open call for film and video works!
Online Entry Deadline January 1st, 2012

The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre "city films". Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction - as well as just a space free to use - is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge  9-19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin.