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Sitting in front of an expansive wall of floor to ceiling bookcases, David Michôd, the director behind films like “Animal Kingdom” and “The King,” confesses that for
the first ten years after film school, he was “stone cold broke.”
“I really didn’t know if there was a career at the end of the path,” he says, before going on to discuss how crafting short films during the early days of his career lead him to his current vocation as a feature filmmaker. But this isn’t a private seminar with the acclaimed Michôd, or even an actual interview. Rather, it’s a nearly 40-minute, Michôd-led creative masterclass, and one example of the many types of content available within Rover’s catalogue, a six-month-old streaming startup dedicated to democratizing the process of creating short films.
Launched in November 2025 by the Australia-based founder Alec Green and co-founders Jack Zimmerman and Will Gibb, the platform pairs a catalogue of short films — including Cannes Palme d’Or winners and Sundance Grand Jury Prize recipients — with the details needed for aspiring directors to pull back the curtain on the process. “Platforms like Mubi or Criterion are incredible for watching films,” says Zimmerman. “What we’re focused on is the layer underneath that, the process.”
To do so, each film on Rover is accompanied by its screenplay, a technical breakdown of equipment and cameras used and, perhaps most importantly, a long-form, podcast style recording from the director in which they go deep on their development journey, festival strategy and other points of interest, like directing non-actors or working with children. “It’s essentially like sitting in the room with the filmmaker,” says Green. Users can search by year, country, festival and genre to find the short they wish to screen; Rover’s highly curated catalog currently features 55, with works starring talent like Emma D’Arcy and Lux Pascal and executive produced by Luca Guadagnino, Patty Jenkins, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
All three Rover founders are aspiring filmmakers, and the central goal of creating the platform was to make “something that we would genuinely want to use,” explains Green. A graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, the idea for Rover came around two years ago when he was constantly hearing that short films were the gateway to the industry — and yet it was incredibly hard to access them. “You hear about a short film premiering at Sundance or Cannes, and then it gets written about for a week and then it disappears,” he says. “If you’re lucky, you know somebody who knows somebody who has a link to the film. But otherwise, it’s a small percentage of the films that actually make it online in the end. There’s this real barrier to seeing the work that’s currently shaping the industry.”
Rover aims to solve that, while also providing filmmakers with a platform that provides a “meaningful release of their film,” says Green. “You spend three years working on a short film, pouring your heart and soul into it, and then it’s like, ‘I put it on YouTube, and it got 60 views,’” he laughs. Rover’s catalog is made up of both films that Green and his co-founders seek out, as well as submitted works. Rover’s curation is key; while the goal is to have a solid catalogue, the team is focused on building it in a slow, digestible way that ensures the content offers something learnable. “What we didn’t want to do was build a platform where you just come onto it and there’s immediately 300 shorts,” says Green. To acquire the shorts, the team pays a licensing fee for a defined window of time, or, if the film isn’t already available online, a fixed fee. (As opposed to YouTube, the paid, shorts-only focus allows filmmakers “to feel like the film is engaged with and respected, and not just passively viewed,” says Green.) As the company continues to grow, another key objective is to make Rover something that can support filmmakers financially, and make “short films a viable thing to do, and not just a debt incurring process,” says Green.
And while the film industry is one often considered to be ruled by informal gateways and insider circles, thus far, the Rover team hasn’t encountered any pushback from directors uneager to share their secrets. Rather, there’s a feeling that they’re contributing to the success of the next generation of filmmakers and film students. “The most exciting part for us is that filmmakers are willing to open up their process. That’s not something the industry has traditionally encouraged,” says Green. And, as he adds, if you’re outside of that world, “it’s very hard to access unless you’re spending massive amounts on tuition.” (Rover subscriptions are priced with that in mind, starting at $4.99 a month.)
“There’s a huge wave of emerging filmmakers right now, many of whom aren’t coming through traditional routes. The challenge is that the pathways into the industry haven’t really evolved at the same pace, so access to how things actually work is still limited,” says Zimmerman. “Rover is trying to open that up.”
