In the Palace International Short Film Festival takes its name and its setting from the historic Balchik Palace on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, making it one of the few short film festivals in the world whose principal venue is a functioning royal residence - the former summer palace of Queen Marie of Romania, which passed into Bulgarian possession after the Second World War and now operates as a botanical garden and museum complex.
Founded in 2003, the festival is held in the small town of Balchik in northeastern Bulgaria, close to the Romanian border and overlooking the Black Sea. The combination of a palace setting, a seaside town atmosphere, and a dedicated competitive programme for short film gives In the Palace a character quite distinct from urban festival events. Screenings take place both within the palace complex and in other Balchik venues, with the summer schedule - the festival typically runs in late July or August - allowing outdoor and open-air screening configurations that suit the coastal setting.
The competitive programme is international in scope, drawing short films from across Europe and beyond for jury evaluation. Categories cover fiction, documentary, and animation, which is the standard tripartite division of most short film festivals operating at this scale. The jury is drawn from film professionals with experience in short-form work, and prizes are awarded across the main categories. The festival has built relationships with the Bulgarian film industry and with the broader Eastern European short film circuit, which has experienced significant growth since the early 2000s as training programmes, film schools, and EU co-production funds have expanded the production base across the region.
Bulgaria itself has a film history that includes notable genre contributions, particularly in the post-communist period when new funding structures created space for more personal and experimental work. The short film format has been an important testing ground for Bulgarian directors who later moved into features, and In the Palace has been part of that ecosystem, providing a local competitive platform at a time when Bulgarian shorts were gaining traction in international festival circuits.
For genre-cinema audiences, short film festivals generally - and In the Palace specifically as an international event - matter because short film is the primary format in which new horror, thriller, experimental, and surreal voices develop before moving into features. Many of the directors whose feature work now defines contemporary genre filmmaking built their reputations through the international short film circuit in the 2000s and 2010s, and events like In the Palace were part of that infrastructure.
The festival's Black Sea coast location gives it an additional cultural dimension. Balchik sits at a geographic intersection of Bulgarian, Romanian, and broader Balkan cultural identity, and the programme has at times reflected this regional perspective by giving particular attention to Eastern and Southeastern European short cinema. The palace and botanical garden setting - with its unusual combination of formal architectural history and natural landscape - also contributes to a festival atmosphere that distinguishes it from the conference-centre or multiplex environments of most competitive film events.
In the Palace International Short Film Festival is a small but genuine node in the European short film circuit, operating from a distinctive location in Bulgaria with a programme that has helped build the infrastructure for short-form filmmaking in a region that continues to develop its cinematic voice.
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