Valga Hot Shorts Open Call Invites Baltic Short Films

This year’s Valga Hot Shorts short film festival will take place from 3–5 July in the urban space of Valga/Valka and invites filmmakers from Estonia, Latvia, and for the first time also Lithuania to submit their short films to the festival’s open competition.

From 15 February to 1 April, Baltic filmmakers can submit short films of up to 30 minutes in all genres. Animations, documentaries, and fiction films are all welcome. The year of production is not important; what matters is the film’s relevance to the festival’s theme.

The 2026 festival theme is “Boundaries of Challenge”, and the festival is looking for stories that help audiences reflect on where the line lies between an exciting challenge and an unpleasant obligation, or how to set boundaries in a way that keeps everyone safe without becoming deadly boring.

The Valga Hot Shorts main programme consists of four competitive programme sections, bringing together the best domestic and international short fiction films, animations, and documentaries. Films selected through the open call will be allocated by the programme curators across the competition sections and presented alongside outstanding short films from around the world.

Inspired by this year’s festival theme, the programme sections carry the following titles:

“Challenge Accepted” – For films bold enough to make their characters take responsibility for their decisions.

”The Flying Circus” - For films that shouldn’t be described verbatim, but experienced with the beautiful audience in Valga and exploring your inner clown.

”Sensing the Boundary” - For films that slowly but surely peel off the layers and make the world around us take notice of boundaries and apres-boundaries surrounding us. 

”Chaos Eternal“  - For films willing to destroy the rules of old comfort in order to build up something new.

Festival programme director Johannes Lõhmus comments:

“Each year we try to push the boundaries of our festival a little further. In the first year, the competition was open only to Estonian films; last year we invited Latvian films as well, and this year we are already welcoming works from filmmakers across the entire Baltic region. We are especially interested in films that manage to surprise us in some way during the programme selection process, and every year our competition programme has also included a number of student films. I therefore encourage everyone to send us their work by 1 April at the latest.”

In addition to the competition programme, audiences will be able to see a retrospective programme, short films by young filmmakers, and short films for children in the cinema hall of the Valga Cultural Centre over the festival weekend. The full Valga Hot Shorts programme will be announced in May, with side programmes revealed in June.

Valga Hot Shorts is an international short film festival taking place for the third time in Valga. It was founded with the aim of focusing on the short film as an independent and fully fledged cinematic art form, and of experimenting with hosting a film festival in summertime Estonia. Since 2024, the festival has been organised by MTÜ Salafilmiklubi, and the first edition of Valga Hot Shorts was made possible thanks to the support of the Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture small projects programme.