Most film festivals built around a curatorial theme define that theme by genre or region. Hiding in Plain Site: International Public Art Short Film Festival defines it by subject matter instead — every submission has to be about public art, in some form — and its open call, running through September 10, 2026, is unusually explicit about which mediums qualify: short films and documentary work, yes, but also video art, experimental media, XR (extended reality), and AI-generated or AI-assisted moving-image work.
A curatorial lens, not a format requirement
The festival’s premise is narrow on purpose: submissions have to expand how public art is experienced or represented, whatever tools were used to make them. Accepted runtimes span 2 to 20 minutes, open to filmmakers, artists, and creative practitioners internationally. What stands out for a call built around a fairly traditional-sounding premise (public art documentation) is how deliberately it doesn’t restrict how that documentation gets made — an XR piece capturing a mural in spatial video, or an AI-assisted reconstruction of a public sculpture, is explicitly as eligible as a straightforward observational short.
That’s a meaningfully different posture from most public-art-adjacent open calls, which tend to default to photography or conventional documentary video as the assumed format. Pairing “public art” as a subject with “XR and AI-generated work” as accepted mediums gives entrants real room to treat the festival as a venue for showing what emerging tools can do with a very traditional subject, rather than restricting them to filming it straight.
The practical details
Submissions close September 10, 2026 — a little over a week out as of this writing, though the festival’s FilmFreeway listing and its own site should be checked directly for exact submission-fee tiers and any late-deadline windows, which weren’t fully detailed on the festival’s public-facing pages. Selected works screen as part of the festival’s curated international program; specifics on venue and screening dates are handled through the festival’s own channels.
Related Reading
- Hiding in Plain Site — official festival site
- Hiding in Plain Site: International Public Art Short Film Festival — FilmFreeway listing
- Public Art Short Film Festival 2026 | Hiding in Plain Site Open Call — Artinfoland
- September 2026 Opportunities: Open Calls, Residencies, and Grants for Artists — Colossal