Five minutes is about how long a song lasts, a coffee goes cold, a stranger decides whether you're worth listening to. It is also, it turns out, plenty of room for a film, as long as nothing in it is filler. That is the one rule this festival is built on: the clock stops at 5:00, credits included, and everything that matters has to happen before it does.

The films we want are made by independent filmmakers who use AI as part of how the picture gets made, whether that means generated imagery, synthetic voices, machine-assisted editing or a pipeline nobody has a name for yet. What we are not looking for is a demo reel. A tool showing off is not a film. A single clear idea, shaped to fit the time and carried by someone's taste, is. Short does not have to mean slight, and a minute of wonder, a joke that lands in ninety seconds or a full five-minute story with an ending all count.

Because every entry is short, the program can be generous. On Sunday, December 20, 2026, from noon to 2 PM, at 2500 University Ave W in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the chosen films play one after another in a single sitting, so a room of strangers gets to watch a dozen different worlds in the time it usually takes to watch one. Filmmakers who are in town take the floor for a Q&A when the last film ends, and then the room stays open: filmmakers, audience and anyone curious about where independent AI cinema goes next, talking over coffee instead of rushing off.

If your film lands its ending before the clock does, we want to see it.