On the evening of September 30, the Center Theater will host a screening of Manhattan Short, the film festival that arrives in Jackson each fall not with a jury of critics or a panel of industry insiders, but with a stack of paper and a request: you decide.
This will be the eleventh consecutive year that the Center for the Arts has presented the festival, a run that stretches back through a pandemic year when the screening went virtual and through a decade of Jackson audiences casting votes alongside filmgoers on six continents. It is a modest distinction on its face — a mountain town showing the same short films as everyone else — but it is also the point. Manhattan Short is built on the premise that audiences around the world should get the same films and an equal say in which one wins.
The festival's origin story is almost stubbornly unglamorous. In 1998, a filmmaker named Nicholas Mason mounted a screen to the side of a truck on Mulberry Street, in the heart of New York City's Little Italy, and screened sixteen short films for whoever happened to walk by. There was no red carpet, no ticketing system, no sponsor banner. Just a truck, a projector, and passersby who stopped to watch.
What happened next is what turned the experiment into an institution. Mason began collecting submissions from around the world, and as he watched them, he noticed something. "The next day you woke up and the world changed," he said in a 2017 interview with the Jackson Hole News & Guide. "If you watch all 600 entries to the festival the next year they were more revealing to me of how the world was feeling than anything else I was seeing or reading in the press." The films, in other words, were not just entertainment. They were a read on the global mood, and Mason decided that more people ought to see them.
So he built a distribution model that had no real precedent. Rather than hold a single festival in a single city, he would send the same slate of finalists to venues around the world and have them screen during the same week. The first years were small. By 2016, the festival was reaching more than 250 cities across six continents. Today the organizers put the number at more than 500 cinemas. The festival's own marketing calls it "the world's first global film festival."
The voting is what makes it more than a distribution gimmick. Manhattan Short does not convene a jury. Every venue that screens the finalists distributes ballots, and audiences vote for Best Film and Best Actor. The votes are tallied at festival headquarters, and the winners are announced on the festival's final day. It is, in effect, a worldwide audience award — one of the few film prizes of any scale that is decided entirely by the people who bought tickets. The festival's organizers call it "the ultimate audience award."
There is a practical benefit for the filmmakers, too. Every film selected as a finalist is automatically Oscar-qualified, meaning it becomes eligible for an Academy Award nomination by virtue of its festival run. The festival arranges a qualifying theatrical run — in recent years at a cinema in the Los Angeles area — so that the shorts meet the Academy's eligibility rules. The results have been striking: in 2024, four Manhattan Short finalists were shortlisted for the Oscars, two were nominated, and one, "I'm Not a Robot," won. For a director who has spent a year or more on a ten- or twenty-minute film, a slot in the final ten can change a career.
The 2026 edition, the festival's 29th, follows the familiar architecture. Finalist films screen at participating venues during the week of September 24 to October 4. The Center's screening falls on Wednesday, September 30, at 7 p.m. in the Center Theater. Tickets are $18.
For Jackson, the festival has become a fixture on a calendar that is otherwise dominated by outdoor recreation and, increasingly, by the seasonal rhythms of a resort town. The Center itself houses roughly eighteen resident nonprofit arts organizations, along with a 500-seat theater, a smaller black-box space, dance and visual arts studios, and classrooms. It is the kind of institution that a town of Jackson's size would not obviously support, and its ability to sustain a decade-plus run of an international film festival speaks to a local appetite that is easy to underestimate.
The appeal of Manhattan Short, though, is not really institutional. It is the format. A viewer walks in without a program of familiar names, watches films from around the world in a single sitting, and then — this is the part that distinguishes it from a normal night at the movies — has to commit. There is no aggregator to check, no critic to defer to. The ballot is the review. And when the winners are announced a few days later, the audience that voted in Jackson will have had exactly as much influence as the audience in any of the other venues.
That is the quiet radicalism of the thing. Most film festivals are gatekept twice: once by the programmers who select the films, and again by the juries who decide which ones matter. Manhattan Short keeps the first gate and throws open the second. The programmers still choose the finalists; the audience chooses the winner. It is a small distinction, but it changes the experience of watching. You are not there to receive a verdict. You are there to deliver one.
For a festival that began with a screen strapped to a truck on a Little Italy side street, that is a fitting place to have ended up — a global event that still behaves like a street screening, with the audience standing in for the jury and the whole world, briefly, watching the same stories at the same time.