On the last night of September, a community room on the second floor of the Manitowoc Public Library will fill with the usual library hush — and then the lights will go down, and a few dozen people in folding chairs will become, for one evening, members of a global film jury.
The occasion is the MANHATTAN SHORT Film Festival, which returns to Manitowoc Public Library's Balkansky Community Room on Wednesday, September 30, at 5 p.m. Attendees will watch the festival's ten finalist short films and then do something unusual for a film screening: they will vote. Every person who walks in receives a ballot and is asked to choose the Best Film and the Best Actor of the program. Those ballots are not a gimmick or a straw poll. They are the festival's actual award mechanism, tallied alongside votes from venues around the world, with the global winners announced in October.
It is a strange and genuinely democratic idea, and it started with a stunt.
According to festival founder Nicholas Mason, who has grown weary of the inaccurate origin stories that circulate in the press, the first MANHATTAN SHORT took place on September 27, 1998. Mason — who notes dryly on the festival's website that he is not, despite some confusion, the drummer of Pink Floyd — mounted a screen to the side of a truck on Mulberry Street in New York City's Little Italy and projected 16 short films to an audience of roughly 300 New Yorkers scattered in the street. That was the whole festival.
The following year, the event moved to Union Square Park, where the finalists were judged by a panel of celebrity judges that included Susan Sarandon, Eric Stoltz, Laura Linney, Roger Corman, and Tim Robbins. For a few years it remained, in Mason's words, "a pretty low key event in NYC." Then came 2001.
The festival had been scheduled for September 23, 2001 — twelve days after the September 11 attacks. In the days leading up to it, Union Square Park had become a shrine, a gathering place for New Yorkers grieving the loss of loved ones, and the park was ringed by the satellite trucks that were beaming images of the city and Ground Zero to the rest of the world. On September 15, Mason received a call from the New York City Parks Department. Whatever else happened, the Parks Department asked, please go ahead with MANHATTAN SHORT in Union Square Park as scheduled.
He did. The event drew enormous attention from the global media, and the following year the festival received double the film entries it had seen before. When Mason sat down to watch all 500 entries in 2002, he found something he hadn't expected: the films, taken together, seemed to reveal more about what was happening in the world — and how people around the world were feeling — than the nightly news did. That realization pointed toward the festival's future. Rather than a New York event with a New York audience, MANHATTAN SHORT would become a single program screened simultaneously in cities everywhere, with the audience itself as the judge.
The model has since become the festival's defining feature. Organizers describe it as "One world - one week - one festival," and the numbers back up the slogan: more than 100,000 film lovers in over 500 cities, spread across six continents, gathering during the same one-week window to watch the same ten films and cast the same two votes. It is billed as the world's first global film festival, and it is difficult to think of another cultural event that asks so many people, in so many places, to render a single collective verdict.
The 2026 edition marks another first. For the first time in the festival's history, the ten finalist films come from ten different countries: the United States, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Moldova, Russia, Cuba, Georgia, and Mexico. The program spans animation, psychological thriller, dark comedy, and drama, and its themes are drawn from the preoccupations of the moment — technology and human connection, truth and belief, family, migration, loneliness, superstition, and the uncertainties of starting over. Among the scenarios audiences will encounter: an AI-dominated future sustained by small talk, a missing care worker and a trail of conflicting stories, a Moldovan village brought to a standstill by a black cat, and a pickup-class assignment that takes a startling turn.
For the filmmakers, the stakes are higher than a trophy. Every film selected for MANHATTAN SHORT is automatically Oscar-qualified, because the festival arranges a full week's advertised theatrical run at a cinema in Los Angeles County. Past finalists have gone on to receive Academy Award nominations — and, in some cases, to win. For a short filmmaker, a slot in the Final Ten is both a global audience and a ticket into the awards conversation.
What that means for a viewer in Manitowoc is that the ten films unspooling in the Balkansky Community Room are not a local selection or a regional sampler. They are the same ten films screening that week in Dublin and Cape Town and Tbilisi and Mexico City, chosen from a worldwide submission pool and dispatched to venues that range from art-house cinemas and museums to breweries, performing arts centers, and public libraries. The library is, in fact, a fitting host. The festival's whole premise is that ordinary people, gathered in ordinary rooms, can function as a credible jury — that no panel of celebrities is needed to determine what is good.
Manitowoc Public Library has been part of that experiment for years, welcoming the festival back season after season. This year's local run offers two chances to see the program: Wednesday, September 30, and Thursday, October 1, both beginning at 5 p.m. in the Balkansky Community Room, a second-floor multipurpose space. The library has been explicit that the same program screens on both nights — so attendees should pick whichever evening suits their schedule, not plan on seeing different films twice. There is no reserved seating and no capacity ticket; ballots are handed out at the door.
The voting itself is straightforward. Attendees mark their choices for Best Film and Best Actor, and the ballots are sent on to festival headquarters, where they are combined with votes from every other participating venue. The global winners are then posted at ManhattanShort.com. In past years, the announcement has come in early October — meaning that the audience in Manitowoc, having rendered its verdict on a Wednesday or Thursday evening, will wait only a few days to learn whether the rest of the world agreed.
That is the quiet appeal of the thing. A person can walk into a library community room in a small Wisconsin city, watch ten short films from ten countries, mark two boxes on a piece of paper, and have that piece of paper counted alongside the ballots of strangers around the world. It is a small act of global citizenship, conducted in folding chairs, with no red carpet and no celebrity jury — just a screen, a ballot, and an audience trusted to know what it likes.
Years after a screen was strapped to the side of a truck on Mulberry Street, the experiment continues. The truck is long gone. The idea is not.