Moviegoers in Glen Ellyn will get a rare chance this fall to help decide an Oscar-qualifying competition, and their $25 ticket will do double duty by funding college scholarships for local high schoolers. The Wheaton-Glen Ellyn branch of the American Association of University Women will host the Manhattan Short Film Festival at the historic Glen Art Theatre on October 1, with screenings at 4 p.m. and 7 p.m.
The event, first detailed by Shaw Local, will screen this year's 10 finalists, chosen from more than 800 entries submitted from 74 countries, with finalists this year representing 10 different countries. Audience members at the Glen Art Theatre, located at 540 Crescent Boulevard, will cast ballots for best film and best actor, and those votes will be combined with ballots from more than 500 viewing sites around the world to determine the festival's overall winners. Organizers plan to announce the results on October 6 at manhattanshort.com.
A Sidewalk Screening That Became a Global Contest
The Manhattan Short Film Festival bills itself as the world's first global film festival, and its origin story is a modest one. Founder Nicholas Mason launched the event in September 1998 by projecting 16 short films onto a screen mounted to the side of a truck on Mulberry Street in New York City for an audience of just 300, according to the Garde Arts Center. Since then, the festival has grown into a roughly 500-venue event that reaches more than 100,000 viewers worldwide each fall.
Making the festival's finalist lineup carries real weight in Hollywood. Every short selected as a finalist automatically becomes eligible for Oscar consideration once it completes a required one-week commercial theatrical run in Los Angeles or Miami, per the festival's own rules. The festival has built a track record as a launchpad toward the Academy Awards, including in 2024, when four Manhattan Short finalists were short-listed and two went on to earn Oscar nominations, led by eventual Live Action Short winner “I'm Not a Robot.”
A Tudor Revival Theater With Its Own Hollywood Footnote
The venue hosting this year's screenings has its own place in local film history. The Glen Art Theatre opened in February 1927 as a single-screen, 1,000-seat theater built in the Tudor Revival style by architect William B. Betts, on the site of a former livery stable. The theater was converted into a four-screen multiplex in the 1980s and served as a primary location and premiere host for the 1986 film “Lucas,” starring Corey Haim and Charlie Sheen, before undergoing a $350,000 digital equipment upgrade in 2013.
Founded in 1956, the AAUW Wheaton-Glen Ellyn branch is the second-largest chapter of the organization in Illinois, with more than 120 members representing Glen Ellyn, Wheaton, Lombard, Carol Stream and Winfield. The branch's fundraising efforts extend beyond a single night at the movies. For more than 60 years, it has organized an annual used book sale that processes over 35,000 volumes and raises roughly $10,000 annually for local high school scholarships and educational fellowships, according to the Chicago Gifted Community Center.
Where the Ticket Money Goes
Proceeds from the film festival support the AAUW scholarship fund and other initiatives aimed at advancing equity for women and girls, part of an organizational mission the AAUW says has driven the fight for gender equity in higher education and beyond for more than 140 years since its founding in 1881. Locally, the Wheaton-Glen Ellyn branch directs four annual scholarships to local high school graduates attending College of DuPage.
Those scholarships arrive as College of DuPage students face rising costs. Trustees approved a $4-per-credit-hour in-district tuition increase for the 2025-2026 academic year, raising rates to $156 per credit hour in what The Courier described as a fourth consecutive year of tuition hikes driven by rising operational overhead. College of DuPage, which serves District 502 across DuPage County, is the largest community college in Illinois, enrolling more than 26,000 students.
