CQT launches international short film festival "Quantum Shorts"

The Centre for Quantum Technologies is pleased to announce the launch of Quantum Shorts 2016, a festival for short films that draw inspiration from quantum physics. We are accepting submissions via shorts.quantumlah.org until 23:59:59 GMT on 1 December 2016.

"We think that filmmakers are like quantum physicists: driven by curiosity, creativity and passion. Please take our big ideas, strange theories and invisible effects and make them yours," says quantum physicist Artur Ekert, who will be a judge for the festival's top prizes. He is also Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore, the organiser of Quantum Shorts. He adds: "We are very happy to be working with partners all over the world to present the Quantum Shorts 2016 film festival."

Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the U.S., and Nature, the international weekly journal of science, are media partners for the festival. The festival has also partnered with leading quantum research centres and prestigious museums and galleries in five countries.

A shortlisting panel will select up to ten submissions to be shown by the festival's screening partners, including Singapore's ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands, the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia and Glasgow Science Centre in the UK. The screenings will take place in 2017.

The festival's top prize of US $1500 and runner-up prize of US $1000 will be decided by a panel of eminent judges. An additional prize will be decided by public vote on the shortlist.

As well as Ekert, the judges are writer and filmmaker Alex Winter, whose most recent film, the award-winning documentary Deep Web, had its world premiere at the SXSW film festival in 2015; physicist Brian Greene, Professor at Columbia University, who is a best-selling author and co-founder of the World Science Festival; Charlotte Stoddart and Eliene Augenbraun, who create engaging video and audio stories for Nature and Scientific American; and curator Honor Harger, Executive Director for the ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore.

The Quantum Shorts contest series is now in its fifth year, having alternated between annual calls for fiction and films since 2012.

Submissions to Quantum Shorts 2016 are limited to five minutes in length. Resources, instructions for how to enter and a full set of rules are available at shorts.quantumlah.org