In America, crowds of 150,000 people are a rare sight to behold, even at our grandest sporting events. In Europe, that number might be expected for a World Cup match, or maybe a gold medal contest at the Olympics.

But in Australia, it’s a spectacle that can be seen every year, a mass not of sports fans, but of movie buffs—150,000 of them, gathered not for the Oscars or a red carpet premiere, but for a marathon of short films dubbed “Tropfest.” This weekend, the second New York variation of that Aussie festival is scheduled to take place in Battery Park, making its debut as an independent event. It’s organized by the people behind the Tribeca Film Festival and boasts an A-list jury comprised of such notables as Griffin Dunne, actress Rose Byrne, and “Capote” director Bennett Miller.

“For those who have never seen it, it’s really quite insane,” said the director John Polson, who helped found the Australian Tropfest in the early 1990s and who serves as the creative director of the New York event. “To have tens of thousands of people come together to watch a movie, it’s more like a rock concert than a film festival. And while it’s a bit more modest here in New York, since we are only in our second year, to still have six or seven thousand people watching your work, as a young filmmaker who might not be able to fill a theater of 200 or 300, it’s a surreal experience.”

Scheduled to take place less than a week before the New York Film Festival’s September 28 opening night, this year’s Tropfest (www.tribecafilm.com/tropfest) — which goes on some four months after the Tribeca Film Festival wrapped — is the latest move on the part of Tribeca Enterprises to expand its hallmark festival into a year-round endeavor.

“We’re hoping to take the Tribeca Film Festival experience, with so much energy and so many films in the spring, and turn this into a year-round experience, by creating new properties and new ways to enter the world of film,” Paola Freccero, the festival’s co-executive director, said. “Through shorts, we can offer a totally different event than the main festival, and hopefully open up this film experience to as many as possible.”

The history of Tropfest links back to one of Mr. Polson’s earliest short films, playfully titled “Surry Hills: 902 Spring Roll.” After he was unable to find an Australian venue to screen the short, he organized an informal screening for cast, friends, and crew in a local restaurant — the Tropicana Caffe. When an audience of 200 unexpectedly showed up for the unadvertised event, he decided he could find an audience out there that was interested in different sorts of films being screened in unique and unusual ways. Shifting venues from the café to a nearby park, he formalized the event in 1993, dubbing it the Tropicana Short Film Festival. Today, in its 14th year, the Tropfest experience has expanded to more than 150,000 spectators, divided among a live crowd and audiences across Australia and Europe watching the event in a live simulcast. And this year marks something of a watershed for the festival, which was provided a feature-length movie, which originated as a Tropfest short, to the ongoing Toronto Film Festival.

As the Australian crowds have ballooned over the decade, Mr. Polson said he has been amazed to see his appreciation for short films rubbing off on others, namely surging crowds that have come to respect the way shorts can approach storytelling and structure in ways that full-length features cannot.

“Clearly during our time, short films have become so much more popular, partlybecauseofthecamera technology, but also because of the Internet and the fact that so many people have been burnt at the movie theater, feeling as if they have wasted two hours,” Mr. Polson said. “With Tropfest and short films in general, if you don’t like what you see, just wait seven minutes and there will be something new. But people have started to catch on, that these are legitimate stories, which enable filmmakers to try entirely new things and look at the world in new ways. It’s miraculous, if you think about it, how funny, frightening, how genuinely moving a movie can be in just three or five minutes.”

Mr. Polson, the director of such big-budget Hollywood films as “Swimfan” and “Hide and Seek,” worked with Robert De Niro, cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival, on the latter film. As the two became friends, Mr. De Niro encouraged Mr. Polson to bring this Australian short film festival to the streets of New York. At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, the imported event was tried for the first time with a preliminary “Tropfest@Tribeca”program, and true to form, it drew larger crowds and more submissions than expected.

Matthew Bonifacio, whose film “The Watering Hole” was selected by a jury that included the director Darren Aronofsky, actress Naomi Watts, and actor Matt Dillon, was the winning director of the event. A year later, Mr. Bonifacio said that thanks to the celebrities affiliated with the event, and the publicity of such a high-profile competition, Tropfest was a veritable launch pad.

“I remember my co-writer and I were on the subway, heading from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and we just couldn’t believe it — that we were on the way to watch our little short film with thousands of people and this elite jury,” Mr. Bonifacio recalled. “After we won last year, we started getting calls from production companies, and then a studio contacted one of the jury members trying to get in touch with me. I mean, your standard film festivals have good, respected juries judging shorts, but to have this platform at Tropfest, to make a name in front of these A-listers, it was unbelievable.”

This Sunday, 16 new directors hope to follow in Mr. Bonifacio’s footsteps, their films chosen from more than 150 submissions to be included in the live competition. Every short film is limited to a total running length of seven minutes, and must somehow incorporate a “signature item” (this year’s theme is “slice”). The evening’s festivities begin with an array of outdoor musical performances at 5 p.m. at the World Financial Center Plaza near Battery Park. Film screenings start at 8 p.m., with the awards — including a sizable $10,000 Target Filmmaker Award — to be announced by the jury immediately after the screenings.

ssnyder@nysun.com