CALL FOR WORK:
2024 FESTIVAL
Media artists and eco-activist friends, give us a HIGH FIVE! It’s the Small File Media Festival’s fifth anniversary! Since 2020, we’ve been raising awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media. We challenge media makers to intervene in the 4K dystopia of bandwidth imperialism by creating original small-file movies of any length, proving once again that small files are THE sustainable cinematic avant-garde.
If you’ve made it, you can submit it – as long as it’s no more than 1.44MB per minute.
Small Files
Here is a tiny selection of some of the over 200 films we have screened at the Small File Media festival since 2020. Almost all of our films will be available in the near future, stay tuned!
When viewing please set playback to 240p or less by clicking the ⚙️ icon on the lower-right of the playback window.
Why small files?
Because streaming media is killing the planet.
NETWORKS, DATA CENTERS, AND DEVICES CONTRIBUTE A WHOPPING 4% OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
But Small Files are here to save the planet – one pixel at a time!
Founded in 2020, the Small File Media Festival (SFMF) is a media-arts festival that raises awareness about the environmental impact of streaming media, which is calculated to contribute 1% of greenhouse gas emissions and rising fast. Streaming comprises a significant proportion of the carbon footprint of information and communication technologies (ICT), which is calculated to contribute about 4% of global greenhouse gases, about the same as the airline industry. ICT is composed of the data centers, networks, and devices that store, transmit, and display all our social media, videos, photos, and other large files, cryptocurrency, artificial-intelligence applications, etc. All these uses require huge amounts of electricity, and about 79% of global electricity comes from fossil fuels: hence the large carbon footprint.
Our associated research team confirmed these figures in a 2020 SSHRC-funded survey of the ICT engineering literature, which generated a 65-page survey document and numerous academic articles, news articles, interviews, and continuing research.) About a third of that is the infrastructural share that supports streaming media. The whole category is busting out of control as people worldwide, intoxicated by corporate media’s siren songs, stream all kinds of media in high definition, video chat, video conference, and play high-resolution online games, not to mention invest in crypto and get hooked on artificial intelligence apps.
Small files to the rescue!
SFMF offers a solution to the rising carbon footprint of streaming through the creation and dissemination of Small-File Ecomedia, low-bandwidth movies of an average of megabyte per minute—a tiny fraction of high-definition video, which is between 60 and 350 megabytes per minute which allows them to be streamed with no damage to the planet. Audiences enjoy small-file movies during our annual online festival and in addition, since 2022, live in the theatre.
International media artists both distinguished and emerging responded to this year’s small-file call for movies that are PUNK/CHIC—forceful and elegant, streamlined, and stealthy, uncompromising in vision, edgy in message. This year we screened over 80 submissions from 18 countries and each artist will receive a CARFAC screening fee for their work.
The 2022 festival ran August 9-14 at the SFU School for the Contemporary Arts in Vancouver, BC, on the unceded traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Watuth nations, for five days of screenings, workshops and musical performances celebrating earth-cooling, PUNK/CHIC small-file eco media.
Small File Media Festival 