Feature length usually means 80 minutes or more. Long enough to be the main presentation. To be a single film on a DVD.

Short films tend to be shorter than that, usually really short. Short films have a tough time finding a market. They are good for festivals and to display your talents but who buys a DVD of a 10 minute movie? So they get dumped together with a bunch of other shorts and it becomes nearly impossible to market them.

So it sounds lik ea feature length short film is a contradiction but perhaps I'm missing a category or something.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Not a dumb question at all. You are just mixing up terms.

As rj said, a "feature" is the term used for films that are longer than 80 minutes. It comes from the pre TV days when a movie theater would show a serial, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, the "B" picture and then the feature presentation. The featured film was the one you were really paying to see, the one with the big stars. The rest was to make a whole evening out of it. Over the years "feature" film came to mean the main half of a double bill - again the one with the big stars - and now it just means a film that is 80 minutes or longer.

According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science any film at 40 minutes or less is a short. So maybe you could call a 60 minute movie a short feature.

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The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)