If you have a minute, Canadian entrepreneurs Sabaa Quao and John Ketchum have the film festival for you.

The third annual online Filminute launched on September 1, with the partners looking to reach 10 million viewers, hoping that theirs will be the largest curated film event in the world. Twenty five one-minute films from 16 countries will vie for a jury prize and commendations, as well as a worldwide audience award.

The festival will be online all month with a live component at London’s famed Selfridges department store, where Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone users can download individual titles. A Toronto event is in the works in advance of the awards presentation October 12.

Both veterans of the knowledge economy, Quao is CEO of U.K.-based Capacity Networks, a media technology incubator, while Bucharest-based Ketchum is a telecom refugee who has transitioned into filmmaking.

Immersed in a mobile telephony market yearning for content, Ketchum came up with the concept of the one-minute film festival, a cost-effective way to generate content without the Babel of user-generated content that makes YouTube so chaotic.

Quao admits he was skeptical about the potential of a VSFF (very short film festival) because the data on mobile video viewing was bleak.

‘Only about two per cent of mobile users were saying they watched video on their devices. That was my first clue. Two per cent was too small an audience,’ he says.

His idea was to expand it out in all directions: the web, cinemas, DVD. That way Filminute could tap not just a broader audience but a broader sponsorship base.

Perhaps the most impressive element of Filminute is the rigor of its selection process, not to mention the caliber of its jury, which includes Academy Award-winning writer-director Paul Haggis. Filminute minions sifted and filtered through 1500 submissions from 60 countries before settling on a short list that represents less than a one-hour commitment – and that’s after seeing every film twice.

www.filminute.com