CineSalon Experimental Film Festival takes place in Cork City and Cobh, Ireland, and online.

It celebrates personal, poetic and formally experimental filmmaking from across the world, providing a platform for film artists to share and discuss their work with adventurous audiences in a relaxed atmosphere. Curated by filmmakers, this defiantly independent festival exists to showcase the wild reeds of visionary film that ignore accepted cinematic paradigms and are all the more inspiring for it.

CineSalon welcomes short film submissions from experimental filmmakers and artists everywhere. A programme of selected shorts screened in-person during the 2025 edition of the festival and an additional series of shorts programmes streamed online between December 5th and December 20th 2025.

CineSalon also features live events, featured artist programmes and masterclasses.

CineSalon Experimental Film Festival grew out of CineSalon, a quarterly experimental film screening event that has taken place in Cork since June 2023.

Regulations:

• Films submitted must be no longer than 15 minutes in length.
• While CineSalon takes a broad interpretation of the term 'experimental', conventional narrative or documentary works will not be considered.
• By submitting your film, you agree that CineSalon can screen it either as part of an in-person screening or an online programme.
• The selection panel's decisions are final and entry fees are non-refundable.
• If your film is accepted, failure to respond in a timely manner to communication regarding providing the festival with a screening file of the film may lead to the film being withdrawn from the festival.
• Films do not have to have premiere status. While we generally favour films made over the past three years, we are open to considering older works. You may submit as many films as you wish.
• All films with non-English language dialogue must have English subtitles.
• CineSalon reserves the right to use stills or clips of up to 20 seconds from submitted films for publicity purposes.
• Ownership and copyright: by submitting a film, you acknowledge that you are sole author and owner of the film, or if you are not the sole author, you have secured all necessary and appropriate rights, permissions and releases in connection with submitting the film.