By Amir Mahboud, Founder of Crown Visual Studio on the first South Melbourne Short Film Festival, held on 29 May 2026.
I got lost in Vienna last year.
Somewhere in the downtown, the streets I thought I knew had stopped making sense, and I was walking around with my phone half-dead trying to find my way back to my hotel. That’s when I saw the sign. A small, hand-finished sign on a doorway, announcing a short film festival starting in twenty minutes.
I had a choice to make. I could keep looking for the hotel, or I could go inside.
I went inside.
The room was small and warm and full of people I didn’t know, speaking languages I didn’t speak. The films were from countries around the world: Japan, Finland, Italy, the United States, and others I didn’t quite catch the names of. The lights went down, and for the next two hours I forgot completely about my hotel, my phone, the wrong turns I’d taken to get there.
The films were small and strange and beautifully made. But what struck me almost as much as the films themselves was the quality of the experience. The image was sharp and bright on the screen. The sound was rich and full, not the thin tinny audio you sometimes get at small venues. Someone had clearly cared, deeply, about how these films were presented, not just which films were chosen. The vibe in that room (strangers sitting together in the dark, paying close attention to something) was one of the most inspiring things I’d felt in a long time.
I walked out into the Vienna night still not knowing where my hotel was. I didn’t mind. I’d already decided, somewhere between the third and fourth film, that I was going to do this in Melbourne.
The first South Melbourne Short Film Festival
On Friday 29 May 2026, in our small studio on Gladstone Street, we hosted the first South Melbourne Short Film Festival. Seven short films. One evening. Thirty people in the room.
The films came from across the world:
- Amazorioca, Antonio Aleixo’s poetic documentary about the Brazilian Amazon, a meditation on identity, ancestral land, and the cost of progress
- My Little Sentry (Meu Pequeno Sentinela), Lucas Marques’s haunting black-and-white tale from the Brazilian countryside, in which a young boy stands guard, for what no one can say
- Her War, Charles Curtice’s quiet, devastating account of an Afrikaans woman sharing a final exchange with a dying British soldier during the Second Boer War
- Forbidden Holiness (טוהר אסור), Doron Neeman’s intimate Israeli drama about Reut, a woman caught between her rabbi’s law and her own longing for a child as the biological clock ticks
- The Candle Seller, Alireza Kamali’s quiet Iranian encounter between a mother asking a stranger for a candle to pray with, and the stranger who has lost his faith in prayer
- Winter Sun, Diana Gelashvili’s tender Georgian coming-of-age story about seventeen-year-old Ani, who discovers she is pregnant as her boyfriend retreats
- Voyeur, Maryam Hashempour’s taut Iranian thriller about a young woman waiting at a coffee shop when an anonymous number sends her photos of herself, taken moments earlier
Seven filmmakers from five countries, trusting their work to a first-time festival in a small Australian studio. That trust still moves me when I think about it.
What the night felt like
I don’t have a polished way to describe it. So I’ll just share what I saw.
During My Little Sentry, I noticed a woman in the second row wiping her eyes. The film doesn’t ask you to cry; it just sits with a small boy in a black-and-white field and lets the weight of his world settle on you. By the end, she wasn’t the only one.
After Forbidden Holiness, a small cluster of audience members were genuinely curious. The film opens a door into a tradition that most of our audience had never seen up close, and they wanted to talk about it. Faith, marriage, the rabbi’s authority, the strange weight of a single decision on a single night. The questions were thoughtful, the kind you only get from people who have been moved.
And The Candle Seller did something I didn’t expect. The film is quiet, almost meditative, and yet for many people in the room it was a window into how prayer, doubt, and faith are lived in another culture. More than one person told me afterwards that the film had stayed with them, that they kept thinking about the stranger and the mother and the candle long after the lights came up.
This is what I think short films can do. Open a window quickly, then close it before you’ve stopped noticing.
What I want SMSFF to become
I’m not trying to build the next Cannes. South Melbourne doesn’t need a Cannes. What I think it needs (what I think we all need, as audiences) is a space where small, careful films can be seen with the attention they deserve.
Short films are too often treated as warm-ups for “real” cinema. They’re not. A well-made fifteen-minute film can hit harder than a two-hour feature. The seven films we screened on Friday will sit with me for a long time, and most of them are works most Melbourne audiences would never have encountered otherwise.
That’s the gap I want SMSFF to fill. I want this festival to be ongoing, a steady home for independent filmmakers from all over the world to bring their work to Australian audiences. I want it to grow, year after year, into something bigger and better, while keeping the same intimate spirit it had on that first Friday night.
Independent filmmakers don’t have armies of marketers behind them. They make their films often with very little, and often for almost no audience. SMSFF exists to give those films an audience. That’s the whole point.
And one thing I want to try next: AI-generated films
I want to be honest about something I’ve been thinking about.
There’s a generation of filmmakers right now exploring AI-generated cinema, using tools like Sora, Runway, Pika, and Veo. The conversation around this technology has been polarised, often angry, and almost always dismissive on either extreme. “It will replace filmmakers.” “It’s not real art.”
I don’t believe either of those things.
I think AI-generated film is going to become its own stream of cinema, in the same way that animation didn’t replace live-action, documentary didn’t replace narrative, and digital didn’t replace film. It will have its own audience, its own grammar, its own masters. Some of it will be bad. Some of it will be extraordinary. And there’s no good reason it can’t sit alongside human-made cinema in the same festival.
Very soon, SMSFF will openly accept AI-generated films alongside traditionally-made shorts.
I want to see how audiences react. I want to see how judges react. I want to know what the differences feel like in a real room with real people, not in an online comment section. I think this is one of the most interesting questions in cinema right now, and small festivals like ours are exactly where these questions should be asked first.
If you’re a filmmaker working in this space, whether traditional, AI-assisted, or fully AI-generated, I’d love to see your work.
What’s next
This isn’t a one-night-a-year festival. SMSFF is going to be ongoing.
We’re already planning more screenings later this year, and we want to keep bringing independent short films to Melbourne audiences regularly, not just once a year. If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, whether as an audience member or a filmmaker, the easiest way to stay in touch is to follow Crown Visual Studio on Instagram.
To the filmmakers who trusted us with their work this year, thank you. To the audience who showed up on a Friday night to watch films in languages they didn’t speak from countries they’d never visited, thank you.
A year ago I was lost in Vienna. Last Friday, thirty people sat in our studio in South Melbourne and watched films from five countries together.
That’s a good year.
SMSFF 2026 was presented by Crown Visual Studio at unit 320/87 Gladstone Street, South Melbourne, on Friday 29 May 2026. Special thanks to our judges Andrea [surname] and Mozh [surname] for their work on the selection.
Crown Visual Studio is an independent creative space in South Melbourne, championing storytellers and short-form cinema.
