Shorts, an annual film festival organised by the Calcutta-based Take 5 Communications and Jamshedpur based social organisation Society for Promotion of Professional Excellence (SPPE), will give the opportunity to film lovers for watching short films this year by going online. The screenings will be streamed on November 27 and 28, where a plethora of short films will be shown to the audience.

The films will largely range from a duration of three to 16 minutes during the two-day festival. While the organisers try to accommodate fresh entries each year, the 13th edition of Shorts will only screen a collection of the best films from the previous year. The movies will be screened on Cisco Webex between 6 pm and 7 pm.

"We did not want to break the continuity so we thought of organising it online. This time we did not invite fresh entries due to the pandemic but have made a collection of the films that were screened in the past. Completing 13 years is an achievement. Only if times would have been normal, we would have organised it in a much better way. As of now movie lovers can watch it online," Take 5 Communications CEO Tathagata Bhattacherjee said.

The two-day affair will have a collection of 15 films. Seven Hindi films, three English, one Bengali, one Arabic and three silent films will be screened over this time. They have been directed by filmmakers from Mumbai, Delhi, Calcutta, Dhanbad and Jamshedpur.

The movies, predominantly in English, Hindi and Bengali languages, have already been presented at several national and international film festivals, and address major social issues like education, cleanliness, and menstrual hygiene.

Films to be showcased on the first day include Jihad, My Little Steps, Dupatta, Reason, Sound of Silence, Rangrez, I Love India, and The Best Gift. The second-day films include Mind Matters, The Waltz, Gandh, Hum Mehfooz Nahi, Smile Vs Smileys, Abandoned, and Bande Hain Hum Uske.