It looked like a professionally produced fan film. Maybe it isn't and I don't know what a "Fan Film" is, but I saw this thing get really deep praise and I don't know if I would go that far. It was nice for what it was.
It's definitionally not a fan-film. Like, it's a film made by fans, but that's getting into the idea that, I don't know, Deep Space Nine is a fan-film when Ron Moore slipped in a mention of kivas and trillium, or Enterprise is a fan-film when Doug Drexler did, well, anything. This is an official authorized Star Trek product produced under license from Paramount Global, the corporate entity that is the legal owner of the intellectual property that makes up the concept of "Star Trek," subject to approvals, fees, and other whatnot. That doesn't make it canon, that's reserved for first-party stuff made directly by Paramount (or CBS, or Desilu, or whatever name the corporation is operating under this year), but it also doesn't make it a fan-film.
There's a blurred line somewhere there. I feel like say, the novels are just fan fiction with a Paramount label slapped on them.
To me this is a fan film that had the blessing of Paramount. It probably helps to have the Roddenberry name attached.
That's the whole thing, though. Calling this a fan-film, or the novels "fan fiction with a Paramount label" is like saying marriage isn't real, it's just fornication with paperwork. Different things mean different things. Even if the novels aren't canon, they're still subject to Paramount's authority and approval; they can't just do whatever they want, Paramount has people whose entire job is to go over all the Star Trek novels (and comics, and video games, and technical demos for the Octane real-time rendering software) and give the thumbs up or thumbs down on whether they adhere to the fundamentals of the Star Trek brand and advice/orders on how to be appropriately Star-Trekky when they step out of line.
For example, let's say OTOY and the Archive decided that it'd be a good idea that, in accordance with Gene's ideas about future social mores, everyone in the park except Kirk should've been stark naked. Paramount's licensing rep in charge of the RA's deal to make Star Trek stuff would've gotten the script or outline or whatever and said, "Nope, we a bunch of naked people standing around is not in keeping with what Star Trek is and is harmful to our brand, given that this is freely available and not on a premium paid service, and it's specifically evoking a very family-friendly era of the franchise which minimized nudity, profanity, graphic violence, and so on."
And the RA would say, "Okey-dokey, everyone's wearing clothes, great note, that was a silly idea," or they'd say "No way, man, Gene wasn't about the censors, he was about naked people in public parks in the future, we're doing our own thing," and then Paramount would say, "Great, but you're going to be doing it without the words 'Star Trek' in the title, the names 'Kirk' and 'Spock,' and any recognizable visual elements that make up the concept of 'Star Trek,' or else we have the right to shut you down, hard."
Fan fiction (or fan films) just start from that last sentence and hope they don't become a big enough fly to be worth the trouble of swatting. It's a totally different reality from being licensed.
