THE inaugural Veterans Film Festival opens tomorrow evening at the Australian War Memorial, with an impressive 150 entries in the Red Poppy Awards competition.

We spoke to Sydney-based festival director Tom Papas about the planning behind the event, one he hopes will become an annual fixture on the Australian cinema scene.

The one-night festival tomorrow will feature two-hours of international short films telling stories about serving and ex serving military personnel, their families and the impact war has on society.

Papas, a familiar face on the festival circuit and the brains behind both the SciFi Film Festival and the ‘screen my shorts’ Film Festival, has over 15 years’ experience in project management.

The Veterans Film Festival, he said, had its genesis in in 2014 when a short film competition he was running about homeless people was “overwhelmed entirely” by films related to veterans affairs. With a solid team of people behind the scenes on the other two festivals, especially “good treasurers”, he sailed in.

“We didn’t know what to expect, we thought we might get about 50 entries,” Papas told me, “but there were 150 submissions from all around the world.”

Papas believes this success was partly luck. “For one thing, “we were really lucky to get the domain name and veteransfilmfestival.com – it’s prime online real estate,” he told “Citynews.”

Most of the films came to him, but of course some curating was necessary and he sought out a French film.

There are 15 competition awards, including the top Red Poppy Awards prizes for Best International and the Best Australian Film, which will each receive a handmade glass “Red Poppy” award crafted by Canberra Glassworks artist Annette Blair.

There also awards for Best Documentary, Best Camera Commemoration of World War I, Best Male Actor Who, Best Female Actor and  Best Director, as with any other film festival. But there are also awards for Best Machinima and Best Animation.

In the final selection for screening there are probably only about 15 documentaries, with bulk of films using war as either the subject or the background for dramatic development. Tom Papas says he created the official selection and whittled 150 entries down to 20 to 25 films, a very difficult task, he says, then they went to the judges.

He’s not about to tells us who won of course—that’s for tomorrow—but some to watch out for are “No man’s land” from Finland, which tells the famous story of the German-English Christmas truce in World War I, “The Haircut” from the  US, about 18-year-old Amy, among the first class of female cadets accepted into military service academies and “Desertion” from the United Kingdom, where Rob, a young soldier ‘deserts’ his pregnant girlfriend by joining the Army.

From Canberra come Laurence de B Anderson’s “The White Feather”, largely shot at Kenmore and ‘100 Years’, a song about remembering soldiers from The Great War, by John and Elisabeth Dykstra, for which they won an ANZAC Spirit Prize winners.

There was an entry from Iran and one from Japan, but most are from “the usual suspects, America, England, Germany, and from around Australia”. All had to be under 30 minutes and the average length, Papas says, is between 2.5 and 20 minutes.

“This year’s program was designed to get people thinking,” Paps says, but some of the judges were in tears because some of the films are so beautiful and the sponsor of Best Australian Film, Vietnam veteran Francis J. Edwards, was reportedly in tears when he saw the winning film—tomorrow you’ll find out just  what that was.

Veterans Film Festival, at the Australian War Memorial 6pm, Wednesday, November 11, bookings to veteransfilmfestival.com