September 13, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Mattie Do’s The Sleeping Beauty is a beguiling fairy tale of accursed love that blends fantasy and horror, born of traditional Laotian folklore.
September 12, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Labour and mythology come crashing together in The Boy with White Skin, a disquieting short set in the pitch darkness of a Senegalese gold mine.
September 11, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Paranoia and past trauma come to bear in Mouse, Rosie Barrett’s short small-town drama infused with an impressive, slowly building tension.
September 10, 2025
Ben Nicholson
The short experimental documentary ‘perfectly a strangeness’ pairs the mundane with the majestic in an equine odyssey to the stars.
September 9, 2025
Ben Nicholson
A single wide-angle perspective gives an eerily voyeuristic air to the smart, lowkey exercise in building tension – Dammen.
September 1, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Mortality is on the mind in Charlie Kaufman’s contemplative and illusory short, How to Shoot a Ghost – an enveloping, chimeric memento mori.
August 29, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Said Zagha’s pulsating neo-noir probes at the dark consequences of being pushed to breaking point in Coyotes, a genre-inflected Palestinian short.
August 22, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Antoine Chapon repurposes eerie architectural animations in ‘The Orchards,’ a paean to a lost Damascus community that attempts to resist its eradication by a vindictive regime.
August 21, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Index, the new short film from Radu Muntean is a low-key thriller that transforms tranquil forest bathing into something far more brooding and disquieting.
August 21, 2025
Ben Nicholson
The documentary vignette ‘I Believe the Portrait Saved Me’ uses a deeply personal story to explore the power of creativity and evoke the teetering knife edge of survival.
August 19, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Baroque farce is the order of the day in Dorian Jespers’ surreal new short, Loynes, that transforms a historical curio into a bizarre courtroom nightmare.
August 17, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Mirjana Balogh’s affirming animation, Wish You Were Ear, finds solace in a dystopian future where ending a relationship requires the physical swapping of a body part.
February 5, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Tying together disparate locations in Northern England and Jamaica, Hope Strickland’s evocative boat ride, ‘a river holds a perfect memory,’ explores the interrelations between labour, memory and rivers.
February 4, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Ostensibly about the preservation of an ancient language, Eva Giolo’s essay film ‘Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths’ combines linguistics with landscape and myth to captivating effect.
February 3, 2025
Ben Nicholson
This Marker-esque monochrome photomontage adapts its protagonist’s docufiction memoir into a slyly funny sketch of a struggling actor in contemporary Tbilisi.
February 2, 2025
Ben Nicholson
Traditional fruit cultivation becomes a source of archival fascination in Common Pear, a sci-fi documentary hybrid set amidst environmental collapse.
February 1, 2025
Ben Nicholson
The third work in Lawrence Lek’s trilogy on disobedient driverless cars, Empty Rider explores autonomy and responsibility through a futuristic AI show trial.
November 20, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A mother and her young son’s relationship is pushed to the limit in Teta, an unnerving psychological horror with disquieting, supernatural overtones.
November 19, 2024
Ben Nicholson
How we consume images and what it means to be a distant onlooker lie at the heart of Miranda Pennell’s sobering, analytical short, Man Number 4.
November 18, 2024
Ben Nicholson
The stories of three very different women intersect in May Ghouti’s delicate ensemble drama The Chant, which manages to pack a quietly emotional punch.
November 17, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Malena Szlam uses in-camera editing to craft Archipelago of Earthen Bones – To Bunya, an evocative 16mm exploration of Australia’s vast central eastern ranges and their deep geological time.
November 17, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Peter Ghesquiere channels Wes Anderson in Manual for a Divorce, a mannered short comedy about a couple who are separated when their children get a divorce.
September 16, 2024
Ben Nicholson
An elderly man savours the small things on what might be his final day alive in Antonin Bonnot’s patient and touching short, At Dawn.
September 14, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A checkpoint stop en route to Tehran leads to a young boy being held for drug possession. A moral quandary ensues in the emotive short, Alone Together.
September 13, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Two young children are left to find their own way when their father commits suicide in Diego Gaxiola’s poignant magical realist short, Nostalgia of a (Still) Alive Heart.
September 12, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A woman in smalltown Montana has a near miss with a serial killer but becomes obsessed with being his victim the dark, absorbing drama – Bits.
September 10, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A young woman confronts her true self in the mirror in this beautifully shot and symbolic evocation of an individual’s transition from female to male in Leo Behrens’ Skin.
September 5, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Coming of age is tough in Almost Certainly False, a deft exploration of identity and duty in the life of a young Syrian immigrant dreaming of leaving Istanbul for Europe.
September 4, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Three Keenings is a darkly comic character portrait depicts an actor presenting a facsimile of grief that is a thin veneer over the real thing waiting to erupt.
September 3, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Claudia Varejao’s experimental documentary, Kora, is a soulful glimpse into the lives of female refugees and the power of photographs in connecting diasporas with home.
September 2, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A closed, patriarchal community begins to transform as the cries of a legendary forest beast foreshadow social revolution in the spirited short, The Poison Cat.
September 1, 2024
Ben Nicholson
The surrealism of images created by artificial intelligence evokes the unreliability of memory and elusive nature of a dystopian plague in the sci-fi short, ‘The Eggregores Theory’.
August 22, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A father and son heading home from football practice face the realities of bureaucracy and the lure of migration in Samir Karahoda’s finely tuned short, On the Way.
August 21, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A passenger train witnesses an act of ethnic cleansing in ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’, a well-drawn portrait of the wary silence of complicity that allows evil to triumph. Winner of the Palme D’Or – Short Film at Cannes.
August 20, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A man fastidiously records his electrical energy consumption, gradually counting down to his demise, in this strangely compelling and poetic 16mm short, 3 MWh.
August 16, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Like a Sick Yellow is a fragmentary portrait of place that blurs fact with fiction to create an elusive and unnerving meditation on memory and the Kosovan war.
August 15, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A young woman acclimatises to the rhythms of a new city while reflecting on those of her lifestyle in looking she said I forget, the heady short from Naomi Pacifique.
August 13, 2024
Ben Nicholson
An innocuous question intended to be sexy and intimate probes at relationship boundaries in Freak, a short film about what it means to be truly honest and truly accepted
August 10, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Kevin Jerome Everson’s latest short – Practice, Practice, Practice – is yet another perfectly calibrated examination of the aspects of African-American labour that packs a powerful punch.
June 26, 2024
Ben Nicholson
The historical documentary Pirates of the Mediterranean combines an operation to uncover a 16th century shipwreck with re-enactment and talking heads to explore an overlooked element of Europe’s past.
June 25, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A father attempts to create some kind of life and legacy for his blind son in this tender but bittersweet Maltese drama, Beautiful Lie.
April 15, 2024
Ben Nicholson
In the slantwise ethnographic documentary ‘Empathfridges’, Rakel Jonsdottir explores the concept of shared fridges in Iceland to create microcosmic portraits of place and community.
April 12, 2024
Ben Nicholson
The experimental short If I die, will I go home? unnervingly explores the psyche of a young man wrestling with how to survive as an adult when bound by the long grip of childhood trauma.
April 11, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A young women who suffered a stroke at the age of thirteen, Hafey reconnects with the use of her body through dance in this moving and affirming documentary portrait.
February 23, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Crypto-currencies and cryogenics become intertwined in Gala Hernandez Lopez’s illusory dual-screen collage which ruminates on humanity’s speculative relationship with the future, for here am i sitting in a tin can far above the world.
February 23, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A filmmaker explores her struggles with motherhood and artistic stimulus through a correspondence and a short film about birdwatching in That’s All from Me, a deft epistolary short.
February 22, 2024
Ben Nicholson
A man has his heart removed in an attempt to lessen his existential anguish in Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s expressive, lingering animation, Tako Tsubo.
February 22, 2024
Ben Nicholson
The outmoded bleach sellers of Tangier offer a window to a simpler time and a resistance against rampant growth in Hicham Gardaf’s tranquil documentary, In Praise of Slowness.
February 21, 2024
Ben Nicholson
An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in the strange and meditative experimental documentary, The Moon Also Rises.
February 21, 2024
Ben Nicholson
Santiago, Chile is both brought into focus and dreamily abstracted in Towards the Sun, Far from the Centre, a languid city symphony featuring a queer couple looking for a space in which they can express themselves.
