SUBMISSIONS FOR #NZWF26

2026 brings our twelfth edition. Our submission period is 1 February – 31 August.

Please read this page before submitting. It ain’t short but it contains important info, updated for 2026. It will save us answering the same questions lots of times, and might save you some time and $$$.

DEADLINES

Our submission deadlines are Early (31 March), Regular (31 May), Late (31 July) and Final (31 August).
Submissions are via FilmFreeway.

Fees increase after each deadline, so save yourself $$$ and submit early if you can.
We select on quality, so your submission has the same chance of being selected regardless of when you submit it.

WAIVERS

Put the puppy eyes away! WE DO NOT OFFER FEE WAIVERS except as part of swap arrangements with partner festivals.

Last year we receive over 150 requests for fee waivers. To us, they mean more work and less income to deliver the festival. Many requests for waivers are sent to us via bcc email, so you can imagine how special we feel when we receive those. Our answer is short, and the second word is ‘off’.

You can see why we’re not keen on them, and you shouldn’t be either. Every fee waiver we grant is another title competing for selection, award nominations and wins, against submissions which have paid a fee.

We do offer fee discounts to participants in our previous edition. We make these offers directly, via email, before we open submissions. If you submitted a show to us in 2025, you should receive a discount code to use in 2025 before we open submissions on 1 February.

If you didn’t, please do get in touch with us at admin@nzwebfest.co.nz

YOUR SUBMISSION

Do us and yourself a favour, and make sure your submission info is correct and complete – and please update your FilmFreeway listing if something changes after you make a submission.

We receive around a dozen submissions each year for which the contact info supplied doesn’t work by the time we confirm all our selections in September. If that info is wrong, we probably can’t contact you. If we can’t contact you, we won’t select your title, so you wasted your submission fee.

Please include stills and social media links in your submission. We spend more time hunting down these things than any other info from submissions.

Please adhere to the runtimes. We don’t mind a submission being a tiny bit over the runtime, but please DO NOT submit a complete series as a single file, unless it’s below the runtime for the category.

LANGUAGES & SUBTITLES

Podcasts are accepted in the English language only, and we only accept audio files, not video – except in the Actual Play/TTRPG Video category.

Shorts and Web Series: If your submission is not English language, English language subtitles must be included, either baked into the video file or as a separate file (we prefer .srt).

NEW in ’26

We haven’t changed much this year.

Vertical format shows
Shows in vertical formats may submit to web series or short film submission categories, and are eligible for selection and awards in that category.
In addition, vertical shows are eligible for consideration for a ‘Best Vertical title’ award for Short Films and Web Series.

Student work
Shows made by students may submit to all submission categories, receive fee discounts, and are eligible for selection and awards in that category.
In addition, shows by students are eligible for consideration for a ‘Best Student title’ award for Short Films and Web Series.
‘Student’ means registered at a recognised educational institute, not a ‘student of life’ or whatever other term you might use to describe a lack of gainful employment. Work submitted must have been created while a student, and may be part of coursework or made independently.

AI
If you’ve used any AI tools in the creation of something you submit to us, that’s fine. We’re perfectly happy to accept and select titles made with AI assistance, but we so have some criteria around our award nominations.
Basically, if you’ve used AI for a particular task – eg writing – we won’t nominate your title for a writing award. It remains eligible for all other awards.
If your production is a wholly AI creation, we won’t nominate it for Best Title award (like Best Narrative Web Series). If we select a minimum of three wholly AI titles in an award category (eg Narrative Web Series), we will offer a Best AI title award for that category.

MAKE YOUR LIFE EASIER

We know that it’s hard to keep up with everything that’s going on with every festival you submit work to.
We can’t fix that, but we can try to make it a bit easier to deal with us.

Here’s what you can expect from us after you submit.

We communicate by email to let you know what happens next, whether that’s to congratulate titles we select, to commiserate with those we’re unable to select, to request audio and video files from selections, to requests clips for award nominees, to issue invitations to award ceremonies, to check mailing addresses for winners.

Please don’t communicate by other means (especially messaging apps and DMs on social) unless it’s urgent. We don’t always see those communications, and it’s much more efficient for us to track conversations through email.

Please make sure that emails from nzwebfest@gmail.com and admin@nzwebfest.co.nz don’t end up in your spam folder.

Of course, if you follow us on socials (@nzwebfest on facebook and instagram) and/or if you sign up for our monthly newsletter, you’ll also keep up to date with what we’re up to – and see timely deadline reminders for NZ Web Fest and other Web Series World Cup and Audio Fiction World Cup festivals.

If you’re one of those organised people who loves to plan ahead, here are our key dates for 2026 (all dates are NZ dates).
1 Feb: Submissions open
31 Mar: Early deadline
31 May: Regular deadline
31 Jul: Late deadline
31 Aug: Final Deadline
8 Sep: All selections announced
20 Sep: Award nominees announced
15 Oct: Full programme announced
13 Nov: NZWF26 opens
13-23 Nov: Enjoy all selected shows
23 Nov: NZWF26 closes

We expect to run our programme of Convo sessions on the weekends of 7-8 and 14-15 November, and our award ceremonies on Sunday 15 November, but these dates are not yet confirmed.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

Please refer to our FilmFreeway page for definitive category-specific and submission fee info. Please note, where possible we present separate awards for NZ and International work.

THAT’S ALL, FOLKS

Thanks for taking the time to read through this.

If anything’s unclear or you have questions, please reach out to us at admin@nzwebfest.co.nz

Submit your work to us via FilmFreeway.

And, finally, good luck!