The Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg (Shortfilm Festival Hamburg, KFF) has ist roots in the independent filmmakers’ scene. It took place for the first time in 1985 as the Hamburg NoBudget Festival. In 1994, it gave itself its current name. Ever since its inception, the KFF has pursued the goals of both presenting ways of dealing with technical, social and aesthetic challenges, and of highlighting the short film as an independent art form. The Festival has been especially successfull in these pursuits because it is part of the Hamburg Shortfilm Agency, which deals with all areas of short film promotion, and is thus able to create a broad range of synergies.

The Festival aims to present new, unknown or unusual works: films which will make their audience reflect on their own ways of perception or help to broaden established patterns of perceiving films. It also tries to highlight the essential qualities of the short – the independent production environment, the focus on central aspects of both the narrative and the visual treatment of its subjects, and the unconventional nature of the aesthetic means used.
Every year in June, the Hamburg KFF creates a space where the short and short film makers take center stage. The Festival is a meeting point for filmmakers and film enthusiasts and provides an opportunity for them to discuss all things cinematic in a relaxed atmosphere. The actual programmes and the accompanying events thus create both a forum for short film-related networking and an attractive showcase for a wider audience.

No other form of cinematic art is as open, experimental, fast, courageous, abstract, hard, discursive or reactive as the short film. At the same time, it has to be incredibly disciplined. Its art lies in its focus – on single pictures, takes, tracking shots or dialogues. It never has enough time and it only has this one chance. It can expect no forgiveness. It is a medium of artistic self-exploration, of the search for a provisional absolute form, of impudence and the marginal.?? In the early days of cinematic history, before there were experimental films because cinema itself was still pretty much an experiment in itself, everything was short and short films were the most popular attractions at fun fairs. Today, short films are the other side of cinema: its cinematographic laboratory, its subconscious and its sense of the things not yet shown, pictured or said. You can rarely find them on the big and small screens and a short film in the review section of a newspaper is a rare exception.