WSM proudly presents Quiet on the Set!  Film Festival 2022. This silent short film competition for Southern Tier youth is a terrific opportunity to engage with the art of filmmaking and showcase your creativity and imagination. Tell a story you want to tell through film — make a movie!

Submission Guidelines

Your film must meet these requirements to be accepted:

• Students aged 11-18 are eligible to enter, and can submit a film as an individual or as a group
•  1-3 minutes in length
• Must be silent:
  • NO spoken dialogue, intertitles okay
  • Title card required
  • Credits required
  • Music soundtrack & instrumental sound effects are okay, but must be original or in the public domain
• Films can be black & white, feature color, and be animated
• NO explicit content

WSM is thrilled to present a new short silent film festival for youth — 2022 is our inaugural year! Our first time around, we co-hosted a student film festival at Cinemapolis in 2017. The festival has been through a few iterations between then and now, though there have been some constants: our desire to encourage and celebrate the imagination of local youth, the interaction between young filmmakers and the juror panel of interested adults from surrounding communities, and the awarding of simple & fun prizes and trophies to the competition's winners!

In 2021 WSM & Ithaca High School collaborated on the virtual soft premiere of Quiet on the Set! exclusively with Ithaca High School Media Arts students. Our filmmakers were approaching the end of an unprecedented school year, one in which their lives differed distinctly from any expectations they might have had, and they had a lot to express. Some of the films were funny, or fantastical, some dealt directly with issues of mental health and boredom or monotony, all of them were wonderful, and we felt honored to watch.

In 2022, we are opening the festival to the Southern Tier and surrounding counties once more. Surely our young people will not have run out of things to say or ideas to bring to life on screen, and we are so proud to launch this annual event and continue to provide a platform for local youth to explore their creativity and interest in media arts, filmmaking, storytelling and more. 

We hope to continue the festival and be able to add to this History section — register now and help us make our dreams a reality!

Thank you to Presenting Sponsor Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College for their continued support (2017 - Present) 

Email: quietontheset@whartonstudiomuseum.org

Youtube: View films from past festivals!