Cities are places of opportunities, but they come with many challenges.

By creating a culture of best-practice sharing through filmmaking, we organize an international contest open to anyone interested in showing the world what happens in cities through a range of diverse issues such as mobility, security, education, housing and much more.

Our Key Objectives :

To Raise Awareness on urban challenges and existing solutions
To Inspire Citizens to reproduce successful initiatives and improve lives in cities.
To Identify new and talented ShortDoc Makers

We want to film local solutions to widespread urban challenges in some of the world’s largest cities, involving people from all over the world… Beyond the production of short films, we want citizens to recreate solutions from other cities and adapt them to their local environments.

Since 2014, over 1 500 filmmakers have joined us in our quest for more liveable cities, provoking and engaging people around with short documentaries.

Every year, the most inspiring shortdocs are screened across the world, in collaboration with French Institutes, UN-Habitat, OECD and the C40.

Learn more about us by downloading our official presentation brochure here (official 2021 brochure).

Our partners

The Greater Paris Metropolis is a dense, urban inter-municipality that includes the city of Paris, 123 municipalities in the three departments of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne and seven municipalities in Essonne and Val d'Oise. The Métropole of Grand Paris is established in order to define and implement metropolitan action to improve the quality of life of its residents, reduce inequalities between regions within it, to develop an urban, social and economic sustainability model, tools to improve attractiveness and competitiveness for the benefit of the entire national territory.

The world is changing. The convergence of an urbanized world with hyper connectivity has disrupted the way we live and do business in our territories.
In this world in transition, complex and interdependent, we need to rethink the links between economy, territory and society. Disruptions, servitization, dematerialization, ecosystems, inclusive innovation, sustainability, collaborative economy, ubiquity, social reputation, are all realities that must be mastered to build change.

EELISA European University is an alliance of nine prestigious universities from different countries in Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Turkey, Romania and Germany) that aims to transform European higher education while strengthening links between engineering and society and implementing a new model of European engineers ready to contribute to global challenges with smart and sustainable solutions. EELISA's acronym also pays a tribute to women engineers through the memory of Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu (1887 – 1973), one of the very first women to obtain an engineering degree.

Each year, three of the winners of the Megacities-ShortDocs Festival go to the Cannes Film Festival to walk the steps and screen their documentaries as part of the Positive Cinema Week.