The "Meet the Press" Film Festival in Collaboration with the American Film Institute

The third annual Meet the Press Film Festival in collaboration with AFl will be held on Oct. 6 and 7 in Washington, D.C. and will feature issue-based documentary shorts along with live discussions with filmmakers, subjects, NBC News correspondents and anchors.

In addition, Meet the Press will have an expanded presence and will present both feature length and short documentaries at AFI Docs in Washington, D.C. and AFI Fest in Los Angeles this year as an official partner of AFI.

Submissions for the Meet the Press Film Festival are now being accepted at NBCNews.com/mtpfilm. Films should be 40 minutes or less, have been completed in the last 12 months, produced primarily in the United States and should be in English or subtitled in English. In the past, film topics have included politics, policy, social and criminal justice, race and equality, gender, voting rights, technology, the debate over gun control, immigration and more.

“We are all storytellers, whether as journalists or filmmakers, our job is the same,” said AFI Festivals Head Michael Lumpkin. “We share a commitment to bringing important truths to our audience — be it in a theater, on television or any other screen.”

Meet the Press announced its ground-breaking collaboration with AFI in August 2017 and has since featured world premieres from Netflix and HBO among others. Films produced by The New York Times Op-Docs, the Reuters Foundation and the Guardian showcased at past festivals have earned Oscar and Emmy nominations for Short Documentaries. Last year, the film festival featured 23 short-length documentaries from filmmakers from across the country.