Don’t let the boyish smile and relaxed charm fool you. Jesse Harris is the founder of the world’s largest (yes, THE WORLD’S LARGEST!) film festival for young filmmakers, so though he’s young, he’s no spring chicken and he definitely knows what he’s talking about when he’s talking about film.

In this particular video – part of our on-going series of video interviews with interesting young filmmakers – Jesse explains how NFFTY selects the films for their festival programming. A lot of what he mentions applies not only to NFFTY, but to all film festivals, so if you’re thinking about submitting your 5-minute masterpiece to some of the thousands of film festivals around the world, take a minute and listen up:

Jesse is currently a commercial director at World Famous. Variety named him one of 25 talents who transformed youth entertainment and was named one of City Arts Magazine’s Top 50 Culture Makers. This is the third video in our interview series with him.