The Monstrale is an international short film festival with three competitions (international, documentary international, films for children aged 9 and over) complemented by curated short film programmes.

With this festival we give a platform to the peculiar in this world. What this means in particular is the cinematic confrontation with everyday actions, rituals, images and circumstances that are questioned and brought into new contexts. In concrete terms, once a year the Monstrale wants to place a level of artistic and cinematic creation at the centre of the viewing that the viewer can only imagine with difficulty or not at all. Monstrale is, so to speak, a search for meaning beyond, or even with the everyday, the strange and even the abstruse and their most diverse variations and appearances. Although the name sounds like monsters, mummies and mutations, this expectation is certainly not fulfilled in an artificial kitsch/horror sense but in the image of the monster on a completely different level, that of the consciously made imagination.

Once a year, the Monstrale becomes the venue of the absurd, the artistic expression, the search for meaning and the monsters of this world.