Love Your Shorts turns 15

Sanford fest marks its quindecennial anniversary

Exclusive to MeierMovies, February 10, 2025

Your 15th anniversary is your “crystal” celebration. I don’t know whether Sanford’s Love Your Shorts Film Festival plans to embrace that mineral, but I do know the fest has made one thing crystal clear over the last decade and a half: It’s the second-best movie event in the Orlando area, following the Oscar-accredited Florida Film Festival. And with continuing support from the community, and roughly two dozen filmmakers expected to attend this year, its position keeps improving.

The festival will run February 13-16 at the historic Ritz Theater at the Wayne Densch Performing Arts Center in Sanford, Florida, and will screen 76 films in competition (from 11 countries), plus five on Thursday’s Education Day. That free event, scheduled for 7 p.m., is hosted by the Organization of Independent Filmmakers (OIF) and will include five additional short movies plus a panel discussion with local filmmakers Albert Gonzalez, Kimberly Di Persia, Jason True, Jasmin Alexa and Parissa Glaser. Local filmmaker TL Westgate will moderate, and the topic will be “Florida Film Works: How I Became a Filmmaker.”

The main part of the fest will launch on Friday night at 7 p.m. with the Opening Night block, containing eight films of various genres. That will be followed by the legendary Opening Night Party, which will be themed this year to Alice in Wonderland. But you won’t need a pill to make you small, as all the films are already short: under 30 minutes.

Your cinematic trip down the rabbit hole will continue on Saturday with six more blocks: E for Everyone at 10:30 a.m. (12 films), Animation at 1 p.m. (13 films), Documentary at 3 p.m. (six films), International at 5 p.m. (six films), Comedy at 8 p.m. (eight films) and Sci-Fi/Horror at 10 p.m. (eight films). That latter block will include the Oscar-nominated Dutch movie I’m Not a Robot.

The Sunday blocks are: Drama at 1 p.m. (five films), Florida Flavor at 3 p.m. (nine films) and Best of the Fest at 7 p.m. That latter block will be comprised of the films that audiences have selected from the previous blocks, plus potentially one extra film chosen by the selection committee.

Each block is $12 except for the free Education Day and the E for Everyone block, which is $5. A weekend pass costs $85. Visit LoveYourShorts.com for more information and to purchase tickets.

Voting tip: At the conclusion of each block, the audience will be asked to vote by text. (If you don’t have a mobile phone, you can request a paper ballot.) You can vote for one or two films, but if you vote for two, you are hurting the chances that your top film will win. As an example, let’s say 99 out of the 100 audience members prefer film A. However, they are told they can vote for two films, so they also select film B. Because the votes are not weighted, their votes for A and B are equal. Then along comes that 100th audience member, who dislikes film A, so he votes for films B and C. So film B wins, though 99 out of 100 audience members preferred film A.

This remains a flaw in the system and one of the reasons the best film often doesn’t move on to the Best of the Fest. The overall winner is then selected by a panel of judges, but if the film doesn’t move on, those judges can’t vote for it.

In recent years, organizers have come up with a way of recognizing a great film that might have been overlooked by the audience. They reserve the right to include one additional film of high quality, which guarantees a slightly fairer process. But to make the process even more fair, I recommend audiences vote for just one film, unless you genuinely can’t make up your mind or have a film of your own in that block. (In the latter instance, one assumes you will vote for your movie, so it’s only fair that you vote for an additional one.)

This will be my 11th time attending the festival and tenth time covering it. Let’s look back at my decade of articles:

2024
2023
2021
2020
2019
2018 (plus additional blog)
2017
2016
2015

Disclaimer: Paul Meier Dialect Services and the International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA), which I co-own, are sponsors. In addition, I will serve as a judge. (The other judges are filmmaker and actor Sarah S. Fisher, filmmaker and photographer Charles Frisby, filmmaker and University of Central Florida professor Georg Koszulinksi and filmmaker Stanley Pomianowski.)

© 2025 MeierMovies, LLC

 

Results

Nine films won their respective blocks and moved on to the Best of the Fest screening on Sunday. Those were Radio Silence; Contracting the Cooties; Gopher Games; A Night, After All; Ms. Rossi 3: Ms. Rossi Meets the Mob; I’m Not a Robot; Turduck-In; SilverSizzle; and Filter 14. In addition, the screening committee picked Les Bêtes to join the block winners. Judges selected I’m Not a Robot as the overall winner.