Openfilm

» see openfilm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The first time I looked at Openfilm properly was in 2026, writing this, and it had been dead for eleven years by then. That is the honest position. A Miami site pitching american independent filmmakers on a financing pipeline was never going to surface in front of me, and whatever I was doing online in 2008 was not looking for short films.

It was founded in November 2007 by Dmitry Kozko and James Caan with Alan Melikdjanian, and opened to the public on 22 July 2008. The premise was stated against YouTube rather than alongside it: you could upload, but a person decided whether it went up. The catalog was meant to be small enough that a visitor could trust it, which is the opposite bet from every other video site of that decade.

Caan chaired it and brought a bench with him. Robert Duvall and Mark Rydell were on the advisory board, Scott Caan too, and the presence of those names was most of the reason anybody covered the launch. An indie video site with an Academy Award nominee attached reads differently in the trades than one without.

It closed in August 2015. There was no farewell post that anybody archived and no stated reason, which for a site whose whole proposition was that somebody was paying attention to your work is a fairly cold way to go. Seven years, and the ending is a sentence on Wikipedia with nothing behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ get it made ~

The contest was the actual product. Submit a live-action or animated short of forty minutes or less that was built as a proof of concept for a feature, and the winner took a package valued at roughly 250,000 dollars: fifty thousand in cash, the rest a commitment to finance the feature version. The first cycle closed on 30 June 2010 and went to Val Lauren for a forty-minute drama called Help.

Openfilm said it would put a million dollars a year into filmmakers through contests like it. Compare that to the arrangement everywhere else in 2010, where the reward for a short film going well online was attention and the hope that attention converted into something later. This site skipped the conversion step and just handed over the budget, which is why the filmmakers who used it took it seriously.

~ the money behind it ~

Openfilm was a Florida company backed by the Miami investor Mike Zoi and absorbed into Net Element, a public company Zoi chaired, with Kozko keeping his title. That structure explains both the money and the end of it. A contest promising a million dollars a year needs a balance sheet behind it, and a balance sheet belonging to a listed company follows whatever that company decides to be next.

What Net Element decided to be next was a payments business. The film property sat inside a corporate parent that was reorganizing itself around card processing, and there is no version of that story where the short-film site with the celebrity advisory board is the priority. The site did not lose to a competitor. It stopped being on anybody's list.

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