PVTV Fringe Flicks

Flicks is PVTV’s underground short film night in Liverpool, built for filmmakers and audiences who like cinema with edges: strange, playful, unsettling, excessive, formally adventurous or impossible to categorise.

For Season 5, we’re looking for short films that don’t quite behave: surreal comedies, strange dramas, experimental videos, animated nightmares, political satire, odd little micro-shorts, polished provocations, awkward miracles and anything else that feels too weird, funny, furious or alive to sit comfortably in the mainstream. We care less about industry polish than whether the film has a distinctive voice, image, rhythm, atmosphere, idea or point of view.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We welcome short films, experimental videos, animations, artist moving image, hybrid work and anything that sits awkwardly between categories.

We’re especially interested in: - experimental cinema - surreal, absurdist, anarchic, and dreamlike shorts - political and social satire, especially work that punches up - films with cult energy - formally inventive filmmaking, whether polished, rough, digital, analogue, animated or live action - films that challenge norms, twist expectations or refuse to behave properly - distinctive micro-shorts with a strong idea, image, joke, rhythm or atmosphere Your film does not need to look a particular way.

It can be polished, rough, funny, angry, quiet, maximalist, tiny, beautiful, grotesque or completely wrong. We’re looking for work with something distinctive about it: a strange idea, a sharp joke, a memorable image, an unusual structure, a strong atmosphere, a specific voice, or just that hard-to-define quality that makes a film stick in your head.

Fringe Flicks champions short films that don’t fit neatly into the mainstream festival mould. We screen to real, engaged audiences in Liverpool, in a social, low-pressure setting designed for people who actually want to encounter strange cinema together.

Each event is carefully curated rather than treated as a random block of shorts. We think about rhythm, tone, atmosphere and how films speak to each other across the night.

The screenings are friendly, informal and audience-facing, with space for conversation, drinks, voting and creative exchange. We’re interested in filmmakers working in their own way, whether that means polished production, DIY methods, experimental process, strange comedy, animation, video art, genre mutation or something harder to name.