Latin Americans are invited to participate in the 140 Characters Film Festival, the first of its kind to celebrate and award short films inspired by Twitter users’ Tweets.
The 140 Characters Film Festival is an open call for film amateurs, students, and professionals from Latin America and beyond to submit a short-film of 140 seconds or less that is inspired by a 140 character or less Twitter post in Spanish. The festival will not only honor those who produce the shorts, but also the “tweet” authors who motivated the cinematic expression in the first place. Most of the influential posts will be drawn from the twitter blog titled “Proverbs from a Digital Era,” that features tweets in Spanish ranging from prolific to profane.
In an interview with Colombia Reports, one of the festivals founders Miguel Norato said “the limitation that people have to only write 140 characters makes it so everyday people write interesting things in a small space. When we began to see the tweets that people were writing, very interesting tweets with interesting content, we thought that it would be good to be able to provide the opportunity for people who like cinema, animation, or video to be shaped and inspired by what people are writing and convert it into a different kind of artistic expression, which in this case is film.”
The content and it’s cinematic interpretation will be extremely varied, but all videos must close with the tweet that inspired the short, as well as the author that published the 140 character quote. So far, Norato estimates that the festival has received around 170 submissions from film makers in roughly 8 different countries- mostly Latin American, with the exception of a few from the United States and one from Israel.
Registration began on September 15 and will close October 8. The festival is free for all who wish to participate, and the last day to upload a short film will be November 5. There will be gold, silver, and bronze awards for each of the 3 categories (amateur, student, or professional), as well as a grand prix prize for the best of the best.
Although the film festival is just starting up with it’s first version, plans are already in the pipeline for round two, which will open up new categories for even greater artistic expression. The primary mission of the festival is to unite growing digital expression with the rich liveliness of the real world.