ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
18 - 25 January 2025
With its annual celebration of emerging filmmakers and the art of short filmmaking, the London Short Film Festival (LSFF) returns for its 22nd edition, taking place 17th - 26th January 2025 across London’s most iconic screens and venues, alongside arts and community spaces and a community-hopping mobile cinema bus.
Continuing its legacy as the UK’s leading short film festival, LSFF will once again bring together the best of independent, boundary-pushing short films and new voices in cinema from around the globe. This year’s festival includes an eclectic line-up of 30+ programmes showing over 200 new short films from the UK and across the world, plus 30 more cutting-edge Special Events, a full Industry offer, and more.
This year’s festival theme, Spaces, will explore the creative, social, and political landscapes of the spaces we inhabit and the cost of their loss – from cinemas and social hubs to social and political third spaces, those vital gathering places that define our collective experience and foster community.
shortfilms.org.uk
@londonshortfilmfest
With its annual celebration of emerging filmmakers and the art of short filmmaking, the London Short Film Festival (LSFF) returns for its 22nd edition, taking place 17th - 26th January 2025 across London’s most iconic screens and venues, alongside arts and community spaces and a community-hopping mobile cinema bus.
Continuing its legacy as the UK’s leading short film festival, LSFF will once again bring together the best of independent, boundary-pushing short films and new voices in cinema from around the globe. This year’s festival includes an eclectic line-up of 30+ programmes showing over 200 new short films from the UK and across the world, plus 30 more cutting-edge Special Events, a full Industry offer, and more.
This year’s festival theme, Spaces, will explore the creative, social, and political landscapes of the spaces we inhabit and the cost of their loss – from cinemas and social hubs to social and political third spaces, those vital gathering places that define our collective experience and foster community.
shortfilms.org.uk
@londonshortfilmfest
Programme
Sat 18 January, 3pm
For The Nile Is My Genesis
Curated by Umloda Ibrahim, For The Nile Is My Genesis offers poignant stories of reflection, joy and resilience by six Sudanese filmmakers. These films, which span a decade and a half, examine the complexities of identity, society, and home.
Sat 18 January, 6pm
Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution! (+ DJ Set)
In the past 50 years, pop has travelled around like an infection, accompanying revolutions, coups and the steady trudge of modern history – a balm for a spiritually lost world. Pop expands beyond its musical resonances as a constellation of social spaces, infiltrating the realm of politics and aesthetics.
Sat 18 January, 7pm
Invitation to Love: Carnival Souls Live Score
Following their well-received improvised live film score to Häxan last year, INVITATION TO LOVE (Laura Groves, Fran Lobo, Hopping Corpse and Auclair) collaborate again to present Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. They come together through a shared enjoyment of sound, weird and wonderful films and creative community.
Sat 18 January, 8.45pm
Documentary: Everything has pulse
How do we respond to the daily rhythms that shape our lives and resonate within us? All life produces, and is governed by, rhythm. A heartbeat, a pattern, a flow. A programme of new UK and international documentary short film, curated by the LSFF Programme team.
Sun 19 January, 1.30pm
Documentary: My Body Has Always Been Your First Cinema
Locating identity within Iranian diaries, confronting the Arabian media archive, and using the writing of Marguerite Duras to interrogate hysterical, silenced ghosts, these short documentaries all deploy radical intervention. They blur the fictional and recompose the chronological. ‘My body has always been your first cinema’ becomes a sentence unwound; the regained self finally taking centre-stage.
Sun 19 January, 4pm
Documentary: All that lingers lasts forever
Exploring the impact of erasure and the truths that endure despite it. There exists a sisyphean struggle to erase certain truths from our lives in an effort to control the wild nature of existence. Amidst this erasure, what truths endure?
Tue 21 January, 6pm
Conjured Realities, Tainted Objects
From Palestinian worldmaking to the Cuban revolution, French colonial capture and Mexican post-revolutionary artistic revivals to the subversion of monuments of indigenous people, this programme explores art's relationship to (anti)coloniality across a range of historical and national contexts.
Tue 21 January, 8.15pm
Under the Pavement, The Sea
Underneath the walls and the fences, the checkpoints and the watchtowers, the waters never cease to flow, eroding the (infra)structures of oppression. In this double-bill, two filmmakers set their gaze upon the cityscapes of Bethlehem and Berlin, while zooming in on the architectural marks left by the state violence.
Wed 22 January, 6.30pm
The Arts Foundation Screening + Q&A
Join us for a special one-off screening featuring the extraordinary shortlisted filmmakers of The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2025 for Film.
Wed 22 January, 7pm
Sore Throat + Q&A
A knock at the door. The traditional announcement ‘Tao po!’ (‘I am human’) is heard,
declaring that the voice is not a monster’s…
Wed 21 January, 8.45pm
All We Have of the House
This selection of archival shorts explores the potential of interventional filmmaking which showcases rare and abandoned footage and reimagines lost landscapes in the digital.
Thu 23 January, 6.30pm
Documentary: Marching forward, looking back
Reflecting on the traces that linger in the quiet pursuit to understand what lies ahead.In our most delicate moments of reflection, how are we to reconcile the lingering fragments bridging past and present?
Thu 23 January, 8.45pm
Can you tell me a poem?
The selection of six non-/fiction diary films, capture the moment everyday life is transformed into a poem - and the mundane is made to become sacred.
Fri 24 January, 6.30pm
The Presence of an Absence
A programme of new short films for lovers of the hauntological, or those interested in the psychogeography of forgotten spaces.
Fri 24 January, 9pm
Intimacy is much more (and much less)
“Intimacy is much more (and much less) than sex,” Sophie K. Rosa writes in Radical Intimacy. This selection of new short films explores the connections we desire, or fear.
Sat 25 January, 12.30pm
Auto-Mythologies
Is any story ever the full truth? Can the same truth ever be recounted twice? Here, six shorts challenge the delineation of documentary and fiction, reminding us that there are even more sides to a story than there are voices to tell them.
Sat 25 January, 3.30pm
Housing problems
Gentrification and unregulated landlordism are fracturing communities, while social housing disintegrates and profits soar. However, as these films constantly underline we can and should resist.
Sat 25 January, 6.30pm
How to look for a future that does not exist
The Films of Basim Magdy
Filmmaker Basim Magdy is simultaneously interested and dismissive of the meanings concealed within the world; as he layers interpretations, he increasingly questions their authenticity. His work doesn't concern itself with a fixed contemporary reality which he views as a masked parade of absurdity. In his eyes, there is no sense or logic in the world—time, memory, future, and dreams all blur together, dissolving into a hazy in-between.
Sat 25 January, 9pm
everything is romantic
Swooning maidens and stolen kisses - are you ready for some classic love stories? Don’t be. Six new shorts tear up the script and find love hiding in the dusty corners where nobody wants to look.
Sat 18 January, 3pm
For The Nile Is My Genesis
Curated by Umloda Ibrahim, For The Nile Is My Genesis offers poignant stories of reflection, joy and resilience by six Sudanese filmmakers. These films, which span a decade and a half, examine the complexities of identity, society, and home.
Sat 18 January, 6pm
Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution! (+ DJ Set)
In the past 50 years, pop has travelled around like an infection, accompanying revolutions, coups and the steady trudge of modern history – a balm for a spiritually lost world. Pop expands beyond its musical resonances as a constellation of social spaces, infiltrating the realm of politics and aesthetics.
Sat 18 January, 7pm
Invitation to Love: Carnival Souls Live Score
Following their well-received improvised live film score to Häxan last year, INVITATION TO LOVE (Laura Groves, Fran Lobo, Hopping Corpse and Auclair) collaborate again to present Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls. They come together through a shared enjoyment of sound, weird and wonderful films and creative community.
Sat 18 January, 8.45pm
Documentary: Everything has pulse
How do we respond to the daily rhythms that shape our lives and resonate within us? All life produces, and is governed by, rhythm. A heartbeat, a pattern, a flow. A programme of new UK and international documentary short film, curated by the LSFF Programme team.
Sun 19 January, 1.30pm
Documentary: My Body Has Always Been Your First Cinema
Locating identity within Iranian diaries, confronting the Arabian media archive, and using the writing of Marguerite Duras to interrogate hysterical, silenced ghosts, these short documentaries all deploy radical intervention. They blur the fictional and recompose the chronological. ‘My body has always been your first cinema’ becomes a sentence unwound; the regained self finally taking centre-stage.
Sun 19 January, 4pm
Documentary: All that lingers lasts forever
Exploring the impact of erasure and the truths that endure despite it. There exists a sisyphean struggle to erase certain truths from our lives in an effort to control the wild nature of existence. Amidst this erasure, what truths endure?
Tue 21 January, 6pm
Conjured Realities, Tainted Objects
From Palestinian worldmaking to the Cuban revolution, French colonial capture and Mexican post-revolutionary artistic revivals to the subversion of monuments of indigenous people, this programme explores art's relationship to (anti)coloniality across a range of historical and national contexts.
Tue 21 January, 8.15pm
Under the Pavement, The Sea
Underneath the walls and the fences, the checkpoints and the watchtowers, the waters never cease to flow, eroding the (infra)structures of oppression. In this double-bill, two filmmakers set their gaze upon the cityscapes of Bethlehem and Berlin, while zooming in on the architectural marks left by the state violence.
Wed 22 January, 6.30pm
The Arts Foundation Screening + Q&A
Join us for a special one-off screening featuring the extraordinary shortlisted filmmakers of The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2025 for Film.
Wed 22 January, 7pm
Sore Throat + Q&A
A knock at the door. The traditional announcement ‘Tao po!’ (‘I am human’) is heard,
declaring that the voice is not a monster’s…
Wed 21 January, 8.45pm
All We Have of the House
This selection of archival shorts explores the potential of interventional filmmaking which showcases rare and abandoned footage and reimagines lost landscapes in the digital.
Thu 23 January, 6.30pm
Documentary: Marching forward, looking back
Reflecting on the traces that linger in the quiet pursuit to understand what lies ahead.In our most delicate moments of reflection, how are we to reconcile the lingering fragments bridging past and present?
Thu 23 January, 8.45pm
Can you tell me a poem?
The selection of six non-/fiction diary films, capture the moment everyday life is transformed into a poem - and the mundane is made to become sacred.
Fri 24 January, 6.30pm
The Presence of an Absence
A programme of new short films for lovers of the hauntological, or those interested in the psychogeography of forgotten spaces.
Fri 24 January, 9pm
Intimacy is much more (and much less)
“Intimacy is much more (and much less) than sex,” Sophie K. Rosa writes in Radical Intimacy. This selection of new short films explores the connections we desire, or fear.
Sat 25 January, 12.30pm
Auto-Mythologies
Is any story ever the full truth? Can the same truth ever be recounted twice? Here, six shorts challenge the delineation of documentary and fiction, reminding us that there are even more sides to a story than there are voices to tell them.
Sat 25 January, 3.30pm
Housing problems
Gentrification and unregulated landlordism are fracturing communities, while social housing disintegrates and profits soar. However, as these films constantly underline we can and should resist.
Sat 25 January, 6.30pm
How to look for a future that does not exist
The Films of Basim Magdy
Filmmaker Basim Magdy is simultaneously interested and dismissive of the meanings concealed within the world; as he layers interpretations, he increasingly questions their authenticity. His work doesn't concern itself with a fixed contemporary reality which he views as a masked parade of absurdity. In his eyes, there is no sense or logic in the world—time, memory, future, and dreams all blur together, dissolving into a hazy in-between.
Sat 25 January, 9pm
everything is romantic
Swooning maidens and stolen kisses - are you ready for some classic love stories? Don’t be. Six new shorts tear up the script and find love hiding in the dusty corners where nobody wants to look.
no. 236848.