If Tropfest was a Hollywood story, it might run something like this: scrappy young ingenue has a stratospheric rise to stardom, loses their way and falls off the radar – then stages a comeback: reformed, wiser, ready for the golden statuette.

The largest short film festival in the world is back, returning this month after a seven-year hiatus, 33 years after its debut at Darlinghurst’s Tropicana Caffe ,which featured a single VHS movie directed by a young out-of-work actor called John Polson, a TV screen, and an audience of 200 spilling onto the street.

Tropfest 2.0 is a bit different. The festival, which quietly bowed out during the Covid era after struggling with various financial problems – including a shock cancellation in 2015 due to “irresponsible mismanagement” of funds – is now run by a new not-for-profit foundation chaired by Sarah Murdoch. It was Murdoch and a small group, including sports administrator Peter V’landys and actor Bryan Brown, who initiated the festival’s return, approaching creator and longtime director John Polson.

Under Polson’s direction, the essence of Tropfest has been retained: a big, free outdoor festival – this time at Centennial Park – of films under 7 minutes, made specifically for the competition, and judged by a star-spangled jury, headed this year by Margot Robbie. As in the past, the event will be livestreamed.

Tropfest’s new era seems promising, with more than 700 short films submitted for the 2026 competition. That’s close to the festival’s record, and even more impressive considering entrants had only four and a half months to make their films, which had to include Tropfest’s famous annual signature item: this year, an hourglass.

Polson is chuffed and a little spun out. “When I cast my mind back eight months to me reaching out to Margot Robbie and saying, ‘Hey, Tropfest is coming back. How do you feel about being on the jury?’ I mean, that’s a little insane … I was surprised that she was up for it, but sort of not, too, because I think most Aussies know what Tropfest is and what it stands for.”

Over 25 years, Tropfest became an unprecedented celebration of and platform for emerging film-makers, kickstarting the careers of film industry luminaries such as Robert Connolly, David Michôd, Justin Kurzel, Bruna Papandrea, and Nash and Joel Edgerton. In its heyday, it drew crowds of about 150,000 to its annual screening in the Domain, and hundreds of thousands more viewers via its national live TV broadcast and satellite screenings. It also consistently attracted top-tier talent to its jury and guestlist, including Susan Sarandon, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Samuel L Jackson, Baz Luhrmann, Keanu Reeves, George Miller, Ewan McGregor and Russell Crowe.

They came to watch films made by people they’d never heard of, that starred unknown actors. Contemplating the improbable success of his 1990s experiment, Polson says “it’s almost comical.”

However, the festival has attracted its share of criticism too – most notably for the underrepresentation of female film-makers. “Tropfest used to be a real boys’ club,” he admits. “[And] the film industry in general.” But this year, 33% of entries and almost half of the finalists are made by women. “I think it’s a major step forward … it’s something we take very seriously.”

Alethea Jones is one of the female film-makers who can thank Tropfest for her career. When she won in 2012 for her oddball comedy Lemonade Stand, she was a Victorian College of the Arts graduate with two short comedies screening on the film festival circuit who felt there was “nowhere for me to go”. “My films would always win the audience award [at film festivals], but not the prestigious jury award – and the jury award is what made you eligible for funding in Australia,” she says. “It felt like Tropfest understood my voice. I found my platform.”

Her prize, awarded by a jury with Toni Collette, Nicole Kidman and Cate Blanchett, included a trip to LA, during which she secured an agent and started making industry connections. Two years later she moved to LA and booked her first TV gig. Three years after that she premiered her debut feature Fun Mom Dinner, starring Collette, at Sundance. She’s since worked with superstar showrunners Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof, and directed Amazon’s upcoming superhero series Spider-Noir, starring Nicolas Cage. She remembers Tropfest as a “gamechanger”.

David Michôd, who won best screenplay in 2000 for co-writing the lo-fi comedy Noise, also says Tropfest was transformative. At the time, he was a few years out of film school and had a couple of short films under his belt, but Tropfest was his first experience of an audience. “[Our film] was rough as guts, but it had an idea that was really fun, and Tropfest was the perfect vehicle for that,” he says. After winning, he convinced the administrator of Trop Nest (the festival’s writing incubator) to let him use a desk at its Fox Studios office for a year – during which he wrote the first draft of his breakthrough hit Animal Kingdom.

“Having the approbation that Tropfest gave me early in the career, when it was just about lo-fi ideas, was a really important stepping stone,” he says.

Polson is optimistic the new Tropfest can have a similar effect on a new generation of film-makers – even in a vastly altered landscape dominated by TikTok and social video and characterised by fractured attention spans.

“The obvious thing [Tropfest offers] is just getting your work seen,” he says. “You’ve got 40 to 50,000 people [at the screening] in the park, you’ve got a live stream on YouTube that’s global, and then you’ve got not just on the judging panel, but in the VIP section that we have, people who can literally fall in love with your film and fall in love with you and change your career overnight.”

He says the technical quality of this year’s entries is generally far higher. “I don’t think you can talk about budgets any more, really; if you’ve got a mobile phone, and if you’ve got a computer … you can make a movie that can get in [to Tropfest].”

While the content has changed – “it felt like every other [entry] was about AI” – most of the shortlisted films “could have been entered at another time. It’s just classic storytelling,” he says.

• Tropfest will be held on 22 February at Centennial Park in Sydney. The event will be livestreamed globally via YouTube.