Interfilm Berlin 2026: Inside the 42nd International Short Film Festival and Its Theme, 'Shared Shores'

A festival announces itself first on the street. Before the catalogue, before the opening night, there are the posters: pasted to walls, wrapped around pillars, catching the eye of people who had no intention of thinking about cinema that afternoon.

Interfilm, Berlin's international short film festival, made exactly this point to its followers a fortnight ago. Had they spotted the posters around the city? They were invited to photograph them and tag the festival.

The festival credited Rron Bajri with the poster and sticker design and Henriette Rietz with the trailer motifs. It is a small courtesy, naming the designers. It is also a statement about what the festival values: the craft around the films, not only the films themselves.

The 42nd edition

Interfilm's 42nd edition runs from 10 to 15 November 2026, which is to say it is under way as you read this. The programme, by the festival's own count as reported in previews, includes more than 300 films across cinemas in the city.

This year's theme is "Shared Shores". In the festival's framing, sharing is both a force of division and a source of unity, and borders are reimagined as places of transition and encounter rather than simply lines.

What is on

The structure is that of a mature festival:

• An International Competition and a Documentary Competition

• A Focus section, with programmes including "Revolutionary Women of West Asia" and "Witness: Arctic Indigenous Voices"

• InterForum, an industry programme of case studies, lectures, workshops and a script pitch competition

• VR films projected onto the 360-degree dome of the Zeiss Planetarium

• The 19th KUKI Young Short Film Festival, running in parallel for younger audiences

• And, my favourite detail, Shcha7sec, now in its 13th edition: a programme of animated films lasting under seven seconds each

An Indian thread

Previews of this year's selection mention a mockumentary, We Were Here, by Bhasin Pranav, in which three AI-sceptical retirees in a small Indian town try to reclaim the tasks that machines have taken over, only for their rebellion to falter when one of their children takes a job at an AI company.

I have not seen the film and will not pretend otherwise. But the premise alone suggests why a festival like Interfilm matters to Indian filmmakers. A short film can carry a very local story to a very international audience, and a story about small-town retirees and artificial intelligence is precisely the kind that a short film can tell better than a feature.

Why short film festivals deserve attention

The short film occupies an odd place in our culture. It is where most filmmakers begin and where few audiences linger. Festivals like Interfilm correct that imbalance. They treat the short not as a calling card for a future feature but as a form with its own logic, its own economy of attention and its own pleasures.

The seven-second animation strand makes the argument with some wit. If a story can be told in seven seconds, the question is not why the film is so short. It is why so many longer films need so much time to say so little.

For Indian filmmakers, the lesson is a practical one. The festival map is wide, and not every important stop on it is Cannes, Berlin's own Berlinale or Toronto. Some of the most rewarding ones are festivals like this, which have spent four decades taking the short form seriously.

For another festival with a door open to Indian work, read our note on the Tirana International Film Festival's 2027 call for entries.

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Kenneth Hopkins is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AltBollywood. Indofuturist, posthumanist and unapologetically Indocentric, he describes himself as an epimemeticist, a swaraji, a freakonomist, a lexicographer and a cartochronicler, mapping the ideas, words and quiet shifts that shape Indian entertainment. Follow him on Instagram at @kennethhopkins.