Sitting in front of a vast floor-to-ceiling wall, David Michod, director of films such as Animal Kingdom and The King, confesses that the first 10 years after graduating from film school were “absolutely cold.”
“I didn’t really know if there was going to be a career at the end of the road,” he said, then went on to talk about how making short films early in his career led to his current vocation as a feature film director. But this isn’t Michod’s acclaimed private seminar or an actual interview. Rather, it’s a nearly 40-minute creative masterclass led by Michaud and an example of the different types of content available within the catalog of Rover, a six-month-old streaming startup focused on democratizing the short film creation process.
Launched in November 2025 by Australian-based founder Alec Green and co-founders Jack Zimmerman and Will Gibb, the platform combines a catalog of short films, including Cannes Palme d’Or winners and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winners, with the details aspiring directors need to bring the process to a close. “Platforms like Mubi and Criterion are great for watching movies,” Zimmerman says. “What we’re looking at is the layer underneath, the process.”
To that end, each Rover film comes with a lengthy podcast-style recording from the director that delves into the script, a technical breakdown of the equipment and cameras used, and, perhaps most importantly, other points of interest, such as the development journey, festival strategy, and working with non-actor directors and children. “It’s basically like sitting in a room with the filmmakers,” Green says. Users can search by year, country, festival, or genre to find the short films they want to screen. Rover’s curated catalog currently features 55 films, starring talents such as Emma D’Arcy and Lux Pascal, and executive produced by Luca Guadagnino, Patty Jenkins, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
Inside view of the rover platform
All three of Rover’s founders were aspiring filmmakers, and their central goal in creating the platform was to create “something they really wanted to use,” Green explains. Mr Lorber, a graduate of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, came up with the idea for Lorber about two years ago after hearing all the time that short films were incredibly difficult to access, even though they were the gateway to the industry. “When you hear about a short film premiering at Sundance or Cannes, it’s written for about a week and then it disappears,” he says. “If you’re lucky, you might know someone with a connection to the movie. But if you’re not, only a small percentage of the movies end up actually being released online. There are real barriers to seeing the work that’s shaping the industry right now.”
Rover aims to solve this problem while also providing a platform for filmmakers to provide “meaningful film releases,” Green said. “I spent three years making a short film, putting my heart and soul into it, and then I’m like, ‘I put it on YouTube and it got 60 views,’” he laughs. Rover’s catalog consists of both films that Green and his co-founders are looking for, as well as submitted works. Rover’s curation is key. While the goal is to create a robust catalog, the team focuses on creating it in a slow and easy-to-understand manner so that the content is learnable. “What we didn’t want to do was build a platform where you could just get on the platform and immediately find 300 shorts,” Green says. To obtain a short film, teams pay a license fee for a defined period of time, or a fixed fee if the film has not yet been released online. (In contrast to YouTube, it focuses exclusively on paid shorts, Green says, so filmmakers can “engage with the film and feel respected, rather than just passively watch it.”) As the company continues to grow, another key goal is to make Rover a company that can financially support filmmakers, “making short films viable and not just a debt-generating process,” Green says.
The film industry is often thought to be dominated by unofficial gateways and insider circles, but so far the Rover team has not encountered any backlash from directors who don’t want to share their secrets. Rather, there is a sense that they are contributing to the success of the next generation of filmmakers and film students. “The most interesting thing for us is that filmmakers are opening up about their process, which is not something the industry has traditionally encouraged,” Green says. And, as he adds, if you’re outside of that world, “it’s very difficult to access that world unless you spend a lot of money in tuition.” (Rover’s subscriptions are priced with that in mind, starting at $4.99 per month.)
“There’s a huge influx of emerging filmmakers right now, many of whom aren’t going through traditional routes. The problem is that the routes into the industry aren’t evolving at the same pace, so access to how it actually works is still limited,” Zimmerman says. “That’s what Rover is trying to pioneer.”
