You've got a 27-minute cut. Your editor says every scene earns its place. Your lead actor says the long silence in act two is "the whole point." And you half-believe them, because you were there when it was shot and you remember what it cost.
So here's the honest answer to how long a short film should be. For almost every filmmaker who wants their short programmed, licensed or sold, the target is under 15 minutes, with the sweet spot somewhere around 10 to 13. It's not an artistic law. It's the way the people who buy and programme short films are forced to think.
They don't think in stories. They think in slots.
How long should a short film be?
A study of the rules of 13,038 film festivals found that eligibility stays above 85% until roughly the 15-minute mark and then falls away sharply, with only around half of festivals still open to a film by 30 minutes. If you want the widest possible set of doors open, aim for under 15 minutes. Longer can work, but every extra minute has to be earned. Stephen Follows
That study is Stephen Follows's, and it's the most useful single piece of data on this question. It's worth sitting with the shape of the curve. It isn't a gentle slope. It's a cliff.
Here's how his cut-off guide breaks down. Films under 10 minutes are eligible at more than 90% of festivals, those running 10 to 20 minutes at around 56%, 21 to 30 minutes at about 26%, and over 45 minutes at just 8.4%. Stephen Follows
Share of festivals you're eligible for by Runtime
Under 10 min - 90%+
10–20 min - 56%
21–30 min - 26%
Over 45 min - 8.4%
Source: Stephen Follows, "How long is too long for a film festival film?"
What officially counts as a short film?
The Academy defines a short as an original motion picture running 40 minutes or less, including all credits, and that's the number most people quote. But it's a ceiling, not a target, and it isn't universal. The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, for example, allows up to 45 minutes for documentaries and 59 for scripted narrative shorts. Oscars.orgWikipedia
The festivals that matter most are tighter still. Cannes caps its competition shorts at 15 minutes, Venice's Orizzonti section at 20, and Berlinale Shorts at 30, while Sundance sits at the generous end, taking shorts up to 49 minutes. Short of the Week
The practical point: "40 minutes" tells you what a short is. It tells you nothing about what a short does once it leaves your hard drive.
Why do festival programmers prefer shorter films?
A shorts programme is a fixed block of time, usually around 90 minutes. Every film competes for minutes in that block, not just for quality. A 40-minute short has to be better than the three 13-minute films it would displace. A 12-minute short only has to be better than one.
Short of the Week put this math more bluntly than anyone. If a festival's screening block runs 90 minutes and your film runs 40, it has to be good enough to take the place of three 13-minute films. Short of the Week
I call this the Slot Test. Before you lock picture, ask a single question: if I were building a 90-minute programme, would I spend this many of my minutes on this film? Not "is it good?" Plenty of good films fail the Slot Test. The question is whether it's good per minute.
And the numbers from the people who actually build those programmes line up with it. Short of the Week's own 2021 curation averaged 13 minutes 12 seconds per film, SXSW's 2022 shorts averaged 12:46 and Sundance's 13:22. At both SXSW and Sundance, the 10-to-15-minute band was the most programmed, while films of 25 minutes or more made up just 3% and 5% of the selections respectively. Short of the WeekShort of the Week
Festival directors will tell you the same thing, less politely. When Follows surveyed more than 500 of them, about half raised running time unprompted in their advice to filmmakers, and not one asked for longer films. Stephen Follows
What do buyers see that festivals don't?
Here's where most runtime advice stops, and where the commercial reality starts. A festival might accept your 34-minute short. A buyer usually can't do much with it.
Anyone who has delivered a film to a broadcaster or streamer learns this early: the slot is a number before it's a story. Linear channels, airline programmes, curated streaming rows and packaged short-film collections all need films that can be combined, scheduled and swapped. A 12-minute film slots into almost anything. A 35-minute film needs a special reason to exist in the schedule.
Follows names this problem precisely for mid-length work. Films in the 30-to-45-minute range fall into a dead zone for many distributors, broadcasters and cinemas: too long to play as a short, too short to fill a standard slot, and too much work for a buyer to package. Stephen Follows
This matters more now than it used to. One of the clearest pathways for shorts is being packaged, grouped with other films into a themed collection a streamer or channel can licence as a single unit. Packages are built from films that sit comfortably next to each other. If you want to understand how those deals are actually structured, start with [How to License Your Short Film](LINK: licensing post). The short version: runtime flexibility is licensing flexibility.
When is a long short the right call?
Sometimes the story genuinely needs the room. Documentary especially tends to run long, and the top of the awards tier skews longer too. The 2022 Oscar shortlists averaged 21 minutes 51 seconds, and Berlinale's shorts that year averaged around 20. Short of the Week
And some of the most consequential shorts of the last decade sit just past the 15-minute line. Take Whiplash.
In 2013, Damien Chazelle couldn't get financing for a feature about a jazz drummer and a monstrous bandleader. So he shot one pivotal scene from the script as a short. The 18-minute film premiered at Sundance 2013 and won the Short Film Jury Award for U.S. Fiction. The short then became central to the pitch as the feature went back out for financing in early 2013. The feature version won three Academy Awards. Filmmakers’ Favorites: Sundance Film Festival Alums on “Whiplash” +2
Notice what Whiplash did not do. It didn't try to tell the whole feature in 40 minutes. It took one scene, one confrontation, and ran exactly as long as that confrontation needed. Eighteen minutes of pure pressure.
That's the real lesson hiding inside every runtime statistic. Long shorts get through when they don't feel long. Short of the Week puts the bar honestly. Once a short passes 20 minutes, their expectations climb, and a film that runs out of steam past that point counts heavily against it. Short of the Week
So if your film is 25 minutes, the question isn't "is 25 allowed?" It's "would a stranger feel every one of those minutes?"
How do you find your film's real length?
Stop asking what length is allowed and start measuring where attention drops. Screen the cut for someone who wasn't on set, watch them rather than the screen, and cut wherever their focus drifts. Remove repeated beats and anything that explains what the audience already knows.
The Utah Film Festival's advice on this is refreshingly blunt. They suggest watching the film with someone uninvolved in the production and then watching them, noticing exactly when their attention wanders. They also warn against chopping a strong film to hit an arbitrary number, recommending you cut repeated ideas, tighten a slow opening, and drop the scene that explains what the audience already understands. Utah Film FestivalUtah Film Festival
A few practical cuts that almost always survive the Slot Test:
- The arrival. Most shorts start two scenes too early. Enter late.
- The second version of the same beat. If a moment lands, the repeat is for you, not the audience.
- The explanation. Trust the image. Programmers judge restraint as craft (see [how festival judging criteria actually weight this](LINK: Judging Criteria post)).
- The credits. They count toward the runtime under the Academy's definition, and a four-minute crawl on a 14-minute film pushes it past the cliff.
And be honest about the one thing a runtime chart can't tell you: whether your film works at your length. Your editor can't tell you. Your cast can't. Your mum definitely can't. That's the problem most filmmakers never solve, and it's the reason so many films sit in the "maybe" pile without anyone saying why (it's a big part of [why you never hear back from festivals](LINK: Why You Never Hear Back post)).
Get a stranger's eyes on your runtime
You've done the hard part: you finished a film. The next hard part is finding out whether every minute is pulling its weight, from people who have no reason to be kind.
[Submit it to FilmFore](LINK: Submit a Film) and you'll get scored, written feedback from working industry professionals, pacing included. If it lands, you'll get a place on The Shortlist, where distributors, programmers and buyers actually look. If it's not quite ready, [here's how to tell before you spend a cent on entry fees](LINK: Aug submission-readiness post).
Cut it to the length it deserves. Then let someone tell you if you got it right.
Frequently asked questions
What is the ideal length for a short film?
For festival and buyer reach, aim for under 15 minutes, ideally 10 to 13. Short of the Week, SXSW and Sundance all averaged roughly 13 minutes in their recent programming. Longer films can succeed, but each minute beyond 15 narrows the festivals and buyers who can realistically programme them. Short of the Week
What is the maximum length of a short film?
The Academy caps shorts at 40 minutes including credits. Individual festivals set their own limits, and many are much tighter. Across more than 13,000 festivals, the most common maximum was 30 minutes. Always check each festival's rules before submitting. Oscars.orgStephen Follows
Is a 30-minute short film too long?
Not automatically, but it's a real handicap. By 30 minutes only about half of festivals will still accept your film, and past half an hour you've lost more than a quarter of them. A 30-minute short needs to feel urgent throughout to justify its slot. Stephen Follows
Do credits count toward a short film's runtime?
Yes, for most official definitions. The Academy's 40-minute limit explicitly includes all credits. Keep end credits tight, because a long crawl can push an otherwise eligible film over a festival's cap or past the 15-minute threshold programmers prefer. Oscars.org