Call for Submissions: Watersprite Film Festival 2025

Watersprite is the world’s largest student film festival. With submissions from over 105 countries, Watersprite seeks to provide a creative, vibrant, and inclusive space for the filmmakers of the next generation.

Watersprite is now looking for the world’s best short films in fiction, documentary, animation, and experimental for its 16th edition! It offer a wide array of exciting awards across several technical and genre categories, which aim to provide long-term career support, offering unique opportunities such as working with respected industry professionals and getting access to the best available equipment. Watersprite goes beyond one-off cash prizes and instead provides you with real, practical opportunities to progress your career in the creative industries.

Award Categories 

• Genre Categories:
  • Fiction – Fiction films often use a narrative to convey a story. There may be a drama or a comedy, or any other narrative subgenre. It involve real people and animals, rather than animated ones.
  • Animation – Animated films involve a narrative in which more than 75% of the running time involves character and/or abstract animation. It may involve, although is by no means limited to, cel animation, stop motion, puppetry or CGI. Photorealistic animation is also considered as animation.
  • Documentary – Documentaries are non-fiction films which concern real-life events, experiences and issues. It is often told in a journalistic style and express opinions or advance views on a particular subject.
  • Experimental – Experimental films are films that break away from traditional cinematic boundaries and conventions. It employ unusual or groundbreaking aesthetic and technical elements and generally do not follow predictable narrative form. It allow for ambiguity and complexity of thought and use abstraction or lyricism in their execution. These films often expand the language of cinema
• Technical Categories:
  • Directing
  • Cinematography
  • Performance
  • Editing
  • Production Design
  • Costume Design
  • Screenplay
  • Original Film Music
  • Sound Design
• Special Awards:
  • Film of the year award – This is awarded to one of the four Genre Award winners.
  • Social Impact Award – This is awarded to a film with a clear humanitarian subject matter, which can range from the local to the global and from the social to the environmental. The film should critically engage audiences, raise awareness of an issue and allow viewers to reflect on the importance and social impact of the topic that is presented, serving either as a call for change or a way of highlighting the details of a current problem. The film can be of any genre.
• Mentorships
  • The Watersprite mentorship is a year-long programme, designed to pair a Watersprite filmmaker with industry professionals who can guide them at a pivotal moment in their career as they take the first steps towards establishing themselves in the screen industries. The mentorships sit alongside their awards and are designed to support the career development of underrepresented filmmakers and address inequality in the screen industries, forming part of Watersprite’s objectives to strive towards a more inclusive, diverse future of film and support emerging talent.  This year, it is offering three mentorships for filmmakers who identify as belonging to any of these groups, which includes but is not limited to:
    • Women: including cisgender women, trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people who are significantly female-identified;
    • LGBTQIA+: including individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, gender non-conforming, non-binary, and intersex;
    • People who have experienced racism or disadvantage on the basis of their ethnicity. This includes but is not limited to: people of African or Caribbean heritage, people of South Asian heritage, people of East Asian heritage, people of Central Asian heritage, people of West Asian heritage, people of Latin American heritage, and Roma and traveler people;
    • People with physical or mental disabilities;
    • People from a low-income background.
  • Applications are also open to those who have experienced a disadvantage due to:
    • Age;
    • Marriage or civil partnership;
    • Pregnancy and maternity;
    • Caring responsibilities;
    • Religion or belief;
    • Regional precedence.

Eligibility Criteria

• All films must have a total running time of 23 minutes or less.
• All films must either be in English, dubbed in English or subtitled in English.
• No advertisements, propaganda or hate speech.
• All films must have completed production no earlier than January 2023.
• They will accept a maximum of two films per entrant per year, unless the individual submitting the film is an agent/film school acting on behalf of others.
• Films may only be submitted to Watersprite once. It will not consider films that have been amended from previous submissions.
• All entrants must be at least 16 years of age at the time of the festival. Under 18s will need parental permission to attend.
• For a film to be eligible for consideration, at least two out of the following three must have been students during film production: Director, Producer, Writer.
• In order for a film to be eligible for a Watersprite technical award, the person responsible for that particular technical aspect of the film must have been a student during film production.
• Watersprite defines ‘student’ as those who are in full or part-time education at any age or those who graduated no more than one year ago. Proof of student enrolment will be required at the submissions stage.
• The exception to this rule is ‘Best Performance’, for which the actor must be an amateur in a student-directed film, and must not have an agent.

For more information, visit Watersprite Film Festival.