Festival | Int Festival

The story continues.
A new circulation for films, resources and ideas.

We believe a film's worth cannot be measured by the awards it has won, the festivals it has played, or the return it found at the box office.
Some films find their audience at the first screening. Others are rediscovered years later. Some need time to be finished; some need another pair of eyes to be seen again. A film's journey does not end with its premiere.
The Sustainers Film Festival welcomes short films with the same curiosity whether they are newly made, previously screened, award-winning, never shown, or long out of circulation. What matters to us is not where a film has stood in the past, but what it says today, the kind of cinema it builds, and how it might go on living in the future.
When we assess a film, we look not only at the result on screen but at the conditions that produced it. The resources used, the production choices, the working methods, the creative solutions and the film's relationship with the natural world all matter to us.
Constraint alone, though, is not a virtue. A small budget, missing equipment or difficult conditions do not make a film good in themselves. What we look for is not scarcity but a creative, measured and responsible relationship with the means at hand. In short, we are less interested in the scale of the resources than in how they were used.
We know that filmmaking is not a field of production separate from nature. Every shoot, journey, set, costume, piece of equipment and consumption choice leaves a trace behind it. So we care not only about what films tell, but about how they produce their telling. We are not asking for perfection or for claims of zero impact. We want to give visibility to work that is aware of its own footprint, does not consume its resources needlessly, and looks for the better option wherever one exists.
We turn the same attention on the festival itself. An event that questions habits of consumption is not credible if it exempts its own way of working from the discussion. From the materials used across the festival to the spaces we build, from printed matter to catering, from transport to waste management, we set out to rethink every choice.
Reducing single-use solutions, reusing what already exists, working with local producers, avoiding unnecessary print, separating the waste we generate and returning organic waste to the soil are not side activities of the festival; they are part of how it works. Instead of striking but short-lived set-ups, we prefer simple, functional and reusable structures.
That said, we do not see the festival as a showcase of perfection. We want to build a living structure that measures its own impact each year, sees its shortcomings plainly, and tries to do better at the next edition. For us, sustainability is less a result achieved than a production culture kept under constant review.
This is why the festival is not only a place for finished films. It also makes room for unfinished work, unused footage, alternative cuts and ideas still waiting to be rethought. A film returning to circulation, finding a response in another context, or becoming the raw material for new work — we see all of this as cinema's natural continuation.
We are not after more films, bigger auditoriums or denser programmes. We want films chosen with greater care, real encounters, and relationships that carry on after the screening ends. A festival should be able to grow its bond with films, with people and with the place it stands in, not just its crowd.
Because cinema is not only something produced; it is a memory that is preserved, shared, reinterpreted and kept in circulation. Our relationship with the natural world is not a matter outside that memory — it is inseparable from it.