Hiding in Plain Site (HPS), an international short-film festival built around public art, is accepting submissions until September 10, 2026, with the screening program premiering October 25 in Minneapolis. It’s organized with Film North as primary partner, supported by the International Sculpture Center and the Institute for Public Art.
The details
- Deadline: September 10, 2026
- Length: works between 2 and 20 minutes
- Accepted forms: film, video art, experimental media, XR (extended reality), and AI-generated or AI-assisted moving-image work
- The one hard requirement: the work must meaningfully feature public art — as a main character, subject, setting, or backdrop. The organizers define public art loosely but usefully: freely accessible, non-commercial, original creative expression, presented outside traditional cultural venues, temporary or permanent
- Eligibility: open internationally to filmmakers, artists, and creative practitioners
- How to apply: via the submission form linked from the festival site; questions go to the organizers by email
- Screening: October 25, Minneapolis
Why this one is worth flagging
Two things make it unusual. First, XR and AI-assisted work are named in the call itself rather than tolerated at the margins. Plenty of festivals still have no category for a piece made in a game engine, captured volumetrically, or assembled with generative tools — and plenty now have explicit anti-AI rules. A program that states up front it wants experimental media, XR, and AI-assisted moving image is a genuinely different submission environment for anyone whose practice lives there.
Second, the subject constraint is a good creative brief. “Make a short film about anything” is a harder prompt than it looks; “make a 2–20 minute work in which public art is the subject, setting, or character” is specific enough to push people somewhere. For creative technologists it’s an unusually natural fit — projection mapping on a facade, an interactive installation in a plaza, a sculpture documented as a volumetric capture, a light piece that only exists after dark. All of that is public art, and all of it is chronically under-documented as moving image.
Practical notes
Documentation you already have is a plausible starting point, but the brief is a film festival, not a documentation call — build the piece as a work in its own right rather than submitting an edit of installation footage. The public-art requirement is the criterion most likely to disqualify otherwise strong submissions, so make the connection unambiguous. Check the festival’s rules and FAQ pages for fee and format specifics before you commit; those weren’t detailed in the summary materials.
Deadline is September 10, which is roughly six weeks out — enough time to finish something, not enough to start it casually.