They’ll make you laugh, they’ll make you cry, and all in the blink of an eye; starting on September 8, the DC Shorts Film Festival will take over four different locations around the area for its 8^th annual competition.

The festival, which runs from September 8-18, is the largest short films festival outside of California and the third largest in the nation. And it’s newly expanded this year—“The shows [in past years] kept selling out, so we wanted to extend the programming to fit the demand,” says the festival’s media contact Laura Gross.

The showcases will feature 8-10 20-minute films each, totaling in 145 films from 23 countries. The films themselves represent wide variety of genres: from drama to animation and everything in between. The festival will overtake four distinct locations around the DC area: Landmark’s E Street Cinema, H Street’s Atlas Performing Arts Center, the U.S. Navy Memorial Theater, and Artisphere in Rosslyn.

For filmmakers, the festival offers a slew of benefits, both from a professional and artistic standpoint. They are given direct feedback on their films, and parties such as the Brazilian Carnival, being hosted on Sept. 10 at Artisphere, allow filmmakers to rub elbows with one another and even establish partnerships for future films.

“The festival is really geared towards community,” Gross says. She means not only the filmmaking community, but toward the DC community as well. The festival’s director, Jon Gann, is a DC native and seeks to share his passion and appreciation for the city with visiting filmmakers.

For a complete list of films, dates, and events, as well as to buy tickets online, visit http://www.dcshorts.com/. Or, find out the details at http://www.facebook.com/dc.shorts or http://twitter.com/#!/dcshorts.