Call for submissions: Milan Machinima Festival 2026 (9th edition)
Festival dates: March 22—29 2026
Location: TBD
Format: onsite and online
Submission window: April 1 – December 30 2025
The Milan Machinima Festival (MMF) invites artists, filmmakers, and experimental creators to submit their work for the 9th edition, to be held in March 2026. Dedicated to showcasing the most innovative forms of game-based moving image, MMF celebrates machinima as a contemporary art form that merges video game technology with cinematic, artistic, and narrative experimentation.
MMF focuses on avant-garde machinima — works that foreground formal experimentation, aesthetic innovation, and critical inquiry. We privilege works that subvert or rethink the visual language of gaming, challenge narrative conventions, and interrogate the politics, ideologies, and possibilities embedded within virtual environments.
Submissions must be made using game technologies — including commercial video games, custom-built game engines, and tools such as Unity or Unreal. CGI-only animations will not be considered. We define machinima broadly as video works created with video game engines, assets, mods, environments, or recorded gameplay footage. Machinima, for us, is first and foremost a form of video art rooted in digital play — a space for experimentation, repurposing, and aesthetic inquiry.
We prioritize avant-garde machinima over vernacular machinima. This distinction is critical to the curatorial identity of the Milan Machinima Festival.
Avant-garde machinima refers to works that adopt a critical, formal, or conceptual approach to the medium. These pieces often challenge conventional storytelling, employ non-linear structures, deconstruct gameplay logic, or subvert visual expectations. They may embrace abstraction, slowness, fragmentation, or minimalism; they often engage with the politics of representation, technological mediation, and algorithmic aesthetics. Their aim is not to entertain in a conventional sense, but to provoke reflection, open up new aesthetic possibilities, or interrogate the grammar of video games themselves.
By contrast, vernacular machinima generally adheres more closely to the norms of mainstream entertainment or fan culture. These works often replicate cinematic tropes, reproduce in-game narratives, or mimic genre conventions without questioning them. While vernacular machinima plays an important role in the history of machinima culture — especially in online communities — it tends to privilege narrative familiarity, recognizability, and fandom-driven content over artistic risk or conceptual innovation.
The Milan Machinima Festival seeks to highlight works that push machinima into new territories — formally, politically, and aesthetically. We encourage submissions that experiment with the medium, question its assumptions, and open unexpected relationships between games and cinema, art and code, fiction and simulation.
What we’re looking for
We are particularly interested in machinima that explores contemporary life through the lens of digital aesthetics. Submissions might address politics, ecology, labor, war, memory, surveillance, or artificial intelligence — but from within the graphic architectures and visual grammar of games. Hybrid forms, experimental documentaries, speculative fictions, ambient meditations, and critical machinima essays are all welcome.
Selected works will be curated thematically and presented in festival sections designed to frame pressing questions and emerging artistic tendencies in the field.
Submission guidelines
-
-
Eligibility: Works must be produced between January 1 and December 30, 2025.
-
Formats accepted: mp4, avi, mpg, or QuickTime file (ProRes 422).
-
Length: No duration restrictions.
-
Multiple submissions allowed, though different versions of the same work will not be considered.
-
Required materials:
-
A completed FilmFreeway submission;
-
A digital video file of the machinima;
-
An artist statement and a detailed list of assets used (including mods)
-
A short biography (max 500 words)
Please note that incomplete applications will not be reviewed.
Critics’ Choice Award
An international jury of scholars, critics, and curators will confer the Critics’ Choice Award to the most groundbreaking work submitted. Past recipients include:
Legal note
The MMF supports fair use and transformative practices. However, the applicant is solely responsible for securing copyright permissions if required. All submissions must be accompanied by a list of materials and modifications employed.
Screening exclusivity
If selected, we ask that the machinima not be screened elsewhere — including on personal websites or video-sharing platforms — for the duration of the festival.
Submission fee
A nominal fee of 15 USD / EUR. Fees are non-refundable.
We strongly encourage prospective participants to review the MMF archives to understand the scope and tone of past editions.
LINK: Read more
