“In Short We Trust”: might seem provocative to some, but for Alessandro Loprieno, founder and CEO of the first worldwide distribution platform dedicated solely to shorts, there is nothing truer… and interest from the Sundance Film Festival, with its known attention to the short form, whether it be fiction or not, proves it.

WeShort, the company founded only two years ago in the Southern region of Puglia, Italy, is now an official partner of the Sundance Institute. The partnership was launched by the WeShort Italian team and the senior programmer of Sundance shorts, Mike Plante, during a festival panel attended by a captivated audience, who continued to ask the partners questions after the presentation. Clearly WeShort has hit a nerve. “Shorts to me represent the art of impression, of capturing the daily life moments and understand and enjoy those moments,” said in its opening remarks Loprieno.  “Short cinema is the new frontier of entertainment,” confirmed Plante, who told the audience that he and his staff of 11 programmers received 11,000 submissions out of which they selected 71 featured in several shorts blocks in the festival.

The moderator Andrea Vailati quoted the Latin philosopher Seneca who said: “We don’t have little time, we lose a lot of it”, citing the need of the modern audience to grab a brief moment of entertainment in between meetings, before going to bed, waiting for a car or, more often, at the gate of an airport waiting for a plane. “Times are changing, and most people don’t think they have two hours in a day to watch a movie,” said Plante, “but most will find 10 or 15 minutes to watch a short. Just like you might not have time to read a novel, but you will have time to read a poem or a short story.”

From here the development of the app/platform, which for a minimal subscription of a few dollars a month acts as a Spotify type of platform, creating playlists (African films, Iranian films, films directed by women, LGTBQ films, thrillers, comedies, and so on) which then following algorithms figures out each user’s particular taste and offers specific suggestions of a title to watch. Legal and corporate affairs advisor Sabino Sernia explained how directors and producers offer their films to the platform signing a licensing agreement which protects their copyright, and then receive a fee according to the number of minutes their films are watched on WeShort. Films can go from 2 to 20-30 minutes, and embrace every genre and method of filming, including animation.

“Today filmmaking is very different from the past,” says Plante. “Both audiences and filmmakers have a huge diversity. In the ‘70’s with the Black filmmakers’ rebellion at UCLA and Angela Davis they were doing the films they wanted, since nobody was going to approve them and finance them anyway, and that’s how so many filmmakers emerged. A similar situation is happening today, when with the new technology’s filmmakers can shoot what they like. Their films might only be seen in a festival like Sundance since most will never see a distribution. With a platform like WeShort even those films have a chance to be seen all over the world.” Loprieno follows: “WeShort is a community building platform, where people can watch and send comments and talk with each other. I believe shorts are an invaluable way of entertaining worldwide. A filmmaker from Ghana, when I was starting the platform, told me that everybody has a cellphone and you can make films with those.. students and professors in schools tell me that shorts can be a meaningful teaching tool. A platform like this, so easy to use for students, will bring cinema in their lives.”

At the moment the platform has a library of a little over 1000 shorts but the projections for growth are huge: it is already present in 152 countries. Loprieno is signing agreements for the theatrical distribution in Italy – then followed by the online – for the most awarded shorts and of course for the Sundance Film Festival shorts. Thanks to its disruptive growth, WeShort has already started investing in a production plan of WeShort Originals.

The Sundance panel was sponsored by Events.com represented by Paolo Privitera as EVP Corporate Development.