Short of the Week

Reserve Spot in Tribeca Virtual Screenings

Festival Tribeca / April 18, 2011

It is April 18th, the first day in which you can make reservations via Tribeca’s new online distribution system in order to “virtually attend” the screenings of 9 new short films, 9 “classic” shorts and 6 new features.

The process is really simple. You sign up for an account (no credit or payment info needed), click on the film you are interested in, and click on “reserve a seat” for the open screening you want. When successful it will change to say “seat reserved”. You return the day of your screening, and auto-magically an embed of your film shows up on the page. You have a 24 hour window to watch.

The new short films have 5 screenings a piece, the earliest starting 4/22. I’ll be watching each film on its first screening and reporting back to you with my thoughts. However because of the unique nature of this experiment, it is possible for these screening to “sell out”. Therefore it may behoove you to sign up for a seat as soon as possible. Indeed, I do not know if it is an early glitch, but all 9 of the “retrospective” short films—great shorts from the festival’s past, have already sold out! (edit: it was a glitch)

Sadly the festival IS GEO-BLOCKED. Meaning, fans outside the US cannot watch. If any of you figure out a way to get around this, please share in the comments! Americans, view the lineup, register, and reserve seats at

Tribeca Festival Screening Room.

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  • Jim

    What is the point of having a virtual screening room and then limiting access? Reminds me of Spike Jonze’s “I’m Here” for Absolut. I understand wanting to screen short films in a special setting (as opposed to on a standard video site where a link to cats falling on their faces shows up after the film or whatever), but I don’t see the reasoning behind artificial scarcity.

  • Jason Sondhi

    “I’m Here” is the experience that came to my mind as well. Its frustrating, but I think it is effective at more closely replicating the festival experience. You create some urgency for people to commit to their screenings due to the limited window and threat of being left out due to scarcity. Any time you ask someone to take an affirmative step towards an action, they feel more serious about it, and as an audience member, this feels more like an “event” than Sundance’s weak, weak rollout in the YouTube Screening Room. Also I think a lot of filmmakers complain about online video, feeling that the audience is distracted and does not commit its full attention, and this helps address that somewhat.

  • Jason Sondhi

    In my meandering comment above,I failed to take in Jim’s frustration about the “Sold Out” retro-shorts. I think I sort of assumed something was off about that scenario—they wouldn’t really lock people out a couple hours after making it public. Suspicions were confirmed, it was just a glitch. I just corrected the post above.