The International Random Film Festival is the first film festival in the world which celebrates randomness in cinema. Out of the submission 25 films are selected to compete each year. The festival is organized annually in a randomly selected location, on a random opening date. Awards are given out randomly.

History

The concept for the festival started as a breakfast-idea one summer morning in 2009 by Hannaleena Hauru (a filmmaker from Finland) and Synes Elischka (a media artist from Austria) – as a critique to the world wide short film festival network. The founders decided to start a film festival that gives an equal possibility to all the filmmakers to have their film screened internationally. The theoretical basis is to deconstruct the concept of a competition in quality.

The first edition of the festival in 2010 was promoted only by a Facebook group. The festival website has been running since April 2011.

Venues

• 2010: 1st edition, Wiesensteig, Germany, February 2010
• 2011: 2nd edition, Bór Zapilski, Poland, July 2011
• 2012: 3rd edition, Anija, Estonia, March 2012
• 2013: 4th edition, Garpenberg, Sweden, December 2013 (opening night at Sagateatern in Hedemora)
• 2014: 5th edition, Gdynia, Poland, November 2014
• 2017: 6th edition, Helsinki, Finland, May 2017 (replacing the originally selected venue Al Hofuf, Saudi Arabia)

Every year the festival takes place on a randomly selected time, in a random venue. The location is selected by opening wikipedia.org and clicking Random article repeatedly, until reaching a page representing a place with a local population. The random selection methods are documented Archived 2013-07-31 at the Wayback Machine on the website.

The date of the Festivals Opening Night is selected by using the True Random Number Generator at random.org.

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  Organizers 2013
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  Opening night 2013
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  Storefront at opening night 2013