Mithiwood festival sees more than 3,000 short film entries in three days

The three-day Mithiwood film festival, held at the Mithibai college campus in suburban Mumbai, saw more than 3,000 short films from 100 countries being entered.

The event was part of the college's international inter-collegiate film festival held between 26 and 28 February 2022 and was sponsored by ZingShorts, a comedy-only short video app.

Its objective was to reach out to content creators, filmmakers and scriptwriters and enable them to earn money through programmes such as the Creator's Corner Initiative and learn about creating brand awareness.

The ZingShorts team had set up a kiosk for all three days to promote the Creator's Corner programme and the Raffles section of the app through activities and quizzes on Hindi cinema and general knowledge.

The questions for the contest ranged from hook steps of popular Hindi songs down to trivia like 'what was India's first silent film' and the even more simple 'who is the president of India'. Some of the answers were hilarious.

The winners of the games received exclusive ZingShorts merchandise like T-shirts, mugs, waist bags and masks. This was followed by team members introducing the app and its features to the audience by walking them through every section and content featured on the app.

The Raffles feature was the most popular with interest in Raffles being key to the massive response for the iPhone 13 Raffle till the moment the winner was announced.

The kiosk witnessed the engagement of over 300 students over the period of the inter-collegiate competition, making it one of the more popular stalls at the festival.

The film festival featured over 30 events, such as a scriptwriting contest, film-making events, stand-up comedy and acting competitions. The ZingShorts team interacted with the scriptwriting contest participants to introduce them to initiatives launched by the platform as well as online events accessible through the app.

The festival was a productive meeting ground with several young content creators, including a rapper, YSG, who created and rapped his own composition for the ZingShorts app in 15 minutes.

The team also visited the Usha Pravin Gandhi college known for its filmmaking programme. The course coordinator for the Bachelor of Arts course in filmmaking introduced the team to the upcoming UPG film festival. The college has agreed to allow its students to create videos on demand for the application.

ZingShorts is a comedy-only short video app by UFO Moviez, which is an investor in Cinestaan Digital Private Limited, which runs this website.