Program 01
Documentary
Observational, patient, occasionally polemic. Films that sit with a subject for longer than the news cycle allows.
8 films →Now showing — week 17, 2026
A bookbinder in Glasgow rebuilds her father's damaged atlas, page by page, while the city outside continues to forget the names of its streets.
Watch ▸On a coastal highway in Oregon the final family-run gas station prepares to close. Four nights, three generations, one espresso machine that nobody wants.
Watch ▸A visual essay on the rituals of ice-swimming in northern Denmark, narrated by a ninety-year-old marine biologist who still breaks the surface every Sunday.
Watch ▸A documentary about the short-term tenants of a century-old clapboard in Maine — the architect, the widow, the teenage novelist, the stranger who left a coat.
Watch ▸An animated meditation, painted frame by frame, on a widower who spends his evenings making wooden spoons he will never give away.
Watch ▸Programs — spring 2026
Program 01
Observational, patient, occasionally polemic. Films that sit with a subject for longer than the news cycle allows.
8 films →Program 02
Cinema that argues. Image, text and voice-over woven together to think out loud about a single small thing.
8 films →Program 03
Scripted work from writer-directors under forty. Mostly one location, mostly two actors, never longer than it needs to be.
8 films →Program 04
Hand-drawn, painted, stop-motion, cut paper. Work that still carries the weight of the human hand behind the frame.
8 films →“We made a home for the films that don't need to go viral.” — from the editor's note, April 2026
In partnership with
Notes from the editors
Whiteflame began, like most stubborn things, as a conversation held too late at night. Three of us had spent the better part of a decade watching short films get buried between brand ads and algorithmic noise, and we were tired. Tired of the way a fourteen-minute piece a filmmaker had worked on for two years would be served up beside a cat video and a crypto ad, and of the way the platforms insisted that the problem was the filmmaker — not the room. So we decided, quite un-modestly, to make a different room. No autoplay. No recommendations. No ranking signals except a human editor with a calendar and a small set of opinions.
We are not trying to be a festival, a streamer, or a magazine. We are trying to be a weekly shelf. Every Monday, a small, curated program of short films opens at whiteflame.net. It stays up for seven days. On the following Monday, most of it goes to rest and a new program takes its place. A handful of films graduate into a permanent collection we call the archive, where they can be revisited without scrolling past anything. We do not pay ourselves from ad revenue, because there is no ad revenue; the site carries nothing that could reasonably be called advertising. The operating costs are covered by a small contribution from the filmmakers whose work we publish, by occasional grants, and by the founders' other jobs. That is, for the moment, enough.
What we ask of visitors is equally modest. Watch one film a week, if any at all. Send us a note if something moved you, or if something didn't. Tell a friend whose taste you trust. Do not share the films on social platforms that will compress them into nine vertical seconds — send a link to the film's page, instead, so the filmmaker's name, the country of origin, and the running time are visible before the first frame. That may sound like a small piece of etiquette. It is, in fact, the whole point: to let a film exist on its own terms, in the shape its maker gave it, in a room built for it.
— Miriam Holloway, founding editor.
Oakland, April 2026.
Submissions
We read every submission. We reply within three working days, even when the answer is no. No submission fee, no template, no rush.