A girl and her horse trudge through the Short Film Corner
“Brother, I would like to clarify that ‘Nuri’ is not officially selected for Cannes,” said director Mithun Jaman, as we strolled together during the festive ‘happy hour’—an all-inclusive party that begins around 5 pm throughout the Marché du Film area in the Palais basement.
This is a longstanding confusion regarding the Cannes Film Festival’s Short Film Corner (SFC). When people hear that a filmmaker has a short at Cannes, they are usually thinking of the prestigious Official Short Film Competition (which competes for the short film Palme d'Or) or La Cinef (dedicated to film school submissions). Those are highly curated, extremely exclusive artistic competitions. However, some less-than-honest parties have previously manipulated the Bangladeshi media into believing that their entry into the Short Film Corner was an ‘official’ entry to Cannes.
This is why Mithun’s standard disclaimer, in the context of the grand chaos of the Palais, was refreshing. The director led me to one of the viewing panels in the SFC video library, where I gained access to over 600 films from all over the world. ‘Nuri,’ directed by Mithun Jaman, was produced by Hasib Zuberi Shihan from Team Platform Ltd.
On the shores of Cox’s Bazar, where the tide constantly reshapes the coast, a quiet sixteen-minute story unfolds. “Nuri” follows an eleven-year-old girl navigating a world shaped by the salt and the wind. In the fragile form of a newborn foal, she finds an unlikely anchor—a gentle bond that brings her renewed resilience and hope at the edge of the sea.
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There are no polished affectations here. The title role is played by a young girl from Cox’s Bazar who has never acted before. Her performance carries the genuine, unscripted truth of the coast, turning the film into a brief but moving meditation on survival and unexpected kinship.
With a gimbal in one hand and a pack of crisps in the other, I took pictures of the camera-shy Mithun. “We have already secured meetings with six producers,” he said. How are the meetings going? He wouldn’t say, as if bound by an oath of confidentiality.
This is a cut-throat market. Industry professionals do not randomly browse hundreds of films; they search with highly specific commercial or programming agendas. A programmer from a major festival might log in looking specifically for "South Asian contemporary drama" or "female-led animation under 10 minutes."
The SFC organises parts of the Video Library into curated sub-categories and national folders. Industry scouts frequently head straight to these pre-screened collections because they represent a vetted standard of regional talent. Getting a short included in one of these institutional showcases within the library significantly increases its visibility compared to letting it sit in the general individual submission pool.
In case you’re wondering how you can get your film into the SFC to also gain access to the Cannes Film Festival, it is rather straightforward. Rather than facing a rigorous artistic selection committee, filmmakers pay a registration fee (around €60) to list their film in the SFC Industry Catalogue and upload it to its private digital video library.
By the time the ‘happy hour’ sizzled down, I had talked to a dozen filmmakers from all over the world who were hoping to get their films onto the main stages of the upcoming Berlinale, TIFF, and Venice Film Festivals. Mithun, by that time, had unofficially confirmed that he had found a willing distributor. If that is true, Cannes served as the first proper documentation of this promising film.
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