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Don Daniel was on the board at Winchester Community Access Media when he kept running up against the same broadcast headache: programs that finished a minute or two short of the top of the hour, leaving awkward gaps in the schedule.
The fix he proposed was practical: Solicit films short enough to slot into the holes. He called the project the Just A Minute Festival.
Almost two decades on, Daniel’s stopgap is an international online showcase. Sixty films, drawn from more than 400 submissions across 39 countries, are streaming at JustAMinute.tv in randomized rotation.
Voting opened May 10 and runs through 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on June 9. Winners will be announced by June 19.
The festival is a Viewers’ Choice event. Anyone can register and vote, but the site requires viewers to watch each entry in full before submitting a rating, and the films play in randomized order so filmmakers cannot turn the contest into a popularity drive among friends.
Winning filmmakers receive cash prizes; active voters are entered into recurring drawings.
The first year drew only a handful of entries. The turning point, Daniel said, came when he partnered with Peter Pulsifer, who helped him build a web presence sturdy enough to carry the festival out of Winchester and onto the open internet.
What had begun as cable-channel filler suddenly had a global front door. The site has drawn as many as 20,000 visitors a day during peak periods, he said, and submissions have arrived from more than 100 countries since 2008.
Daniel has spent decades in the film industry and has taught film and television production at Boston University, Chapman University and Emerson College.
The 60-second limit, he said, is a discipline in its own right.
“Mastering the one-minute format is a masterclass in creative constraint,” Daniel said.
There is, he added, “zero room for traditional exposition or lengthy backstories.”
A filmmaker has the opening few seconds to set a premise; everything after that runs on visual efficiency.
The 2026 slate suggests how far that compression can stretch. Selections include “A Boy Opens the Door” from Serbia, “AnimaFabula” from Ukraine, “Catch The Tooth Fairy” from Australia, “Bonjour” from France and “Water Dream” from Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside U.S. entries such as “Lonely” from Charlottesville, Virginia, and “Ramonas Creation” from Amherst, Massachusetts. Non-English entries arrive with English subtitles, a festival requirement.
A jury that included Academy Award nominees, Emmy winners and studio executives narrowed the field. Entries that ran even a fraction over the limit were disqualified outright.
Daniel argues the format suits the moment. Vertical streaming apps and short-video platforms have trained audiences to expect a hook within seconds, he said, and a 60-second film fits comfortably inside a TikTok scroll.
The cliffhanger and the shock cut, he noted, have become the modern grammar of attention. A one-minute commitment, he added, is its own kind of mercy; he has sat in plenty of theaters waiting out features he regretted starting.
“The beautiful guarantee of a short film is its brevity,” he said.
The barrier to making one has fallen along with the running time. Entries can be shot on any modern smartphone, and Daniel argues that gear matters less than the idea behind it — “a compelling story will always outshine expensive equipment,” he said.
The festival’s resource page lists low-cost mobile apps for tasks from script formatting to color correction.
Winchester remains stitched into the project even as it has reached around the world. The festival has received support from the Winchester Cultural Council, a local agency funded in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. JustAMinute.tv lists additional grant support from the Beverly Cultural Council, the Billerica Cultural Council, the Cambridge Arts Council and the Lexington Council for the Arts.
Winchester filmmakers have produced four or five winners over the festival’s run, Daniel said. No local films made the final cut this season. He framed the absence less as a setback than as an opening for next year, and as a reminder that the festival functions as a low-cost foothold for emerging filmmakers anywhere with a phone and an idea.
Voting closes June 9, with the 60 selections rotating through the site until then. Whether a viewer watches one film or sits through all of them, the contract is the same as it was when the project was just a way to keep the Winchester broadcast clock honest. A story has a minute to land. Then it’s gone.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He runs The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
