Several Viennese institutions active in the promotion of short films arranged one day of the one-week event.

Annually recurring festival events, which were introduced in 2005, are a retrospective of the University of Applied Arts Vienna and a Kino Kabaret.

A retrospective was dedicated to Austrian director Mara Mattuschka and short films from Southeast Europe were given a special focus.

Major thematic focuses were the memory of the years 1939 (the outbreak of World War II) and 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) as well as the United States and Russia.

Retrospectives were devoted to, inter alia, Ben Rivers, Norbert Pfaffenbichler and Lotte Schreiber, and the California Institute of the Arts.

The 2010 VIS Festival was held at seven screening locations in Vienna and two new competitions in the category of international narrative and documentary short film were added: Animation Avantgarde and a national competition that awarded the country's first Austrian Short Film Award.

Retrospectives on the works Miranda Pennell and Thomas Draschan were presented and the independent Vienna broadcast channel Octo as well as the Austrian national network ORF offered lengthy television coverage on the festival.

Joaquín Cociña, Cristóbal León, Niles Atallah (Chile): Luis Max Hattler (Germany/UK): AANAATT