[1][2] The Festival has been widely cited for its early engagement with the vertical format by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab,[3] in textbooks,[4] in patents for new technologies,[5] in academic papers,[6] by the ProVideo Coalition,[7] and in media sources ranging from Norway's public broadcaster NRK[8] to Wired Magazine,[9] ZDnet,[10] the Huffington Post,[11] Editions Financial,[12] the Chicago Tribune,[13] Guachazh[14] in Brazil to L'Obs[15][16] in France.

The Festival's website also offers a 'tips & tricks' guide to would-be vertical filmmakers dealing with various practical problems posed by having to work against apparatus and editing software often only designed for shooting horizontally.

[24] Its co-founding directors are brother-sister team Adam Sebire and Natasha Sebire[25] who initially conceived it as an interesting solution to an inherent problem faced by the ACF's film screening event: its principally vertical subject matter felt compositionally squashed by the standard 16:9 film frame, which had replaced the 'squarer' 4:3 frame in the early 2010s.

In 2016 the 2nd edition of the Festival[28] moved quite literally across the road to another high-roofed venue, the independent Charrington Brewery, to be projected amidst the beer hops.

[30] The Festival announced that it would not run a 4th edition as scheduled for 2020 due to the logistical and economic challenges facing live screening presenters during the COVID-19 pandemic.