News

LSFF 2025 opens this weekend | 17th-26th Jan

Opening this weekend, 17th January, the London Short Film Festival (LSFF) returns for its 22nd edition to celebrate emerging filmmakers and the art of short film-making.

The eclectic programme will run across London’s most iconic screens and venues, including the BFI Southbank, ICA, Curzon Soho, Rio Cinema, and Rich Mix, and a free 1960s Mobile Cinema Bus roaming around the city.

Continuing its legacy as the UK’s leading short film festival, LSFF once again brings together the best of independent, boundary-pushing short films and new voices in cinema from around the globe. 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 the elusive third spaces, those vital gathering spots that define our collective experience and foster community. 

Curated by cinematic and cultural tastemakers across disciplines, the Events programme brings prescient discussions to the foreground through moving image works from across the globe and the history of cinema. Screenings underscoring London’s urgent crises of rising gentrification and so-called “regeneration”, a severe shortage of affordable housing in a rapidly expanding city (Housing Problems by Ed Webb-Ingall & Oliver Dixon) and powerful expressions of Black and queer cultures from Waywaad Collective’s Always Been Here, and Lauren Gee’s Everywhere We Are Islands, focused on new voices in Caribbean filmmaking.

Young cinema-goers can discover Soviet Children’s Animation and family-friendly films from Offbeat Film Club. Expect out-of-this-world screenings in the rarely seen early comedy shorts of TV Burp icon Harry Hill in Holidays on Mars; and curated by Nelly Ben-Hayoun: Alien Extravaganza: a queer, colourful, experimental galaxy of new short-filmmaking.

Representing the taboo on-screen erotica, the team behind Sinéad O’Dwyer’s infamous London Fashion Week presentation, Lover Management, present their own debauched evening film programme, Dark Fantasies. Action-loving collective Babes with Blades present a celebration of badass women in the action genre (as part of the nationwide BFI Art of Action season.) Film critic Cici Peng presents Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution! – exploring Pop’s influence on counter-culture, featuring global experimental moving-image works from 1968 to the present day, followed by a pop party hosted at the ICA.

 

LSFF 2025: championing radical, innovative filmmaking and the future of independent cinema.


Find the full LSFF 2025 programme here.


Programme Highlights:

Fri 17 Jan

  • Halcyon Days: Radical Short Films of the 1990s screening and party, 6.20pm at Curzon Soho + Farsight Collective 

Sat 18 Jan

  • Mobile Cinema, from 11am in Bell Square, Hounslow
  • Everywhere We Are Islands, 5.30pm at Rich Mix 
  • Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution!, 6pm at ICA Cinema
  • LSFF x Invitation to Love: Carnival of Souls (+ live score), 7pm at ICA Theatre
  • UK Competition: House Of Mirrors (+ filmmaker’s Q&A), 8.45pm at BFI 

Sun 19 Jan

  • Community Spirit: Cinema and Filmmaking in London’s Edgelands (walk + screening), 12pm at House for Artists, Barking
  • Mobile Cinema, 11am at Crystal Palace Park
  • LSFF x Waywaad Collective: Always Been Here, 3pm at Ritzy 
  • LSFF x Babes with Blades: Cutting Edge Shorts 3pm at Rio Cinema
  • Holidays on Mars: The 16mm Films of Harry Hill and David Leister (+ Q&A), 6.45pm at BFI 
  • Alien Extravaganza, 8.45pm at Rio

Mon 20 Jan

  • International Competition: The Melody Haunts My Reverie (+ filmmaker’s Q&A), 8.45pm at BFI

Tue 21 Jan

  • UK Competition: Panoramics (+ filmmaker’s Q&A), 8.45pm at BFI 

Weds 22 Jan 

  • LSFF x Babes with Blades: The Villainess, 6pm at Rio Cinema
  • International Competition: Echoes of the Unseen (+ filmmaker’s Q&A), 8.45pm at BFI 

Thurs 23 Jan 

  • Dark Fantasies, 6.45pm at Rio Cinema 

Sat 25 Jan

  • Ragga to Rocklands: The Sounds of Deptford and New Cross (walk + screening), 11am at Lewisham Arthouse
  • Housing Problems, 3.30pm at ICA Cinema

Sun 26 Jan

  • LSFF Awards, 3pm at Curzon Soho