Celebrating emerging filmmakers and the art of short film-making, 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, including the BFI Southbank, ICA, Curzon Soho, Rio Cinema, and Rich Mix, alongside arts and community spaces such as SET Peckham, and a free 1960s Mobile Cinema Bus roaming around the city.
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 204 new short films from the UK and across the world, including the New Shorts competition, plus 30 more cutting-edge events, industry networking, and more.
The Opening Night at Curzon Soho will celebrate LSFF’s vast alumni, with a retrospective of over two decades’ worth of short films screened at the festival, ending in a party at Farsight Collective. Across its 22-year history, LSFF has been host to many debut short films from some of today’s most compelling filmmakers including the early film works of Luna Carmoon, Rose Glass, Andrea Arnold, Peter Strickland, and Alice Lowe.
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. A crucial conversation to be having now as nearly half of UK indie cinemas operated at a loss last year, and dozens of UK cinemas have closed since 2020.
Bringing cinema directly to London’s neighbourhoods, LSFF will offer free screenings of its New Shorts programme across the city. Supported by the BFI awarding funds from the National Lottery, LSFF will revive a unique piece of cinema history: a restored 1960s Mobile Cinema Bus, originally built to bring films to communities without cinemas. With seating for 22, the bus will travel to Walthamstow, Crystal Palace Park, and Hounslow, transforming local spaces into intimate screening venues. The LSFF program will also include walking tours of lost local cinemas and venues, with screenings of short films set in the underrepresented suburbs of Deptford & New Cross, and Barking & Dagenham.
Curated by cinematic and cultural tastemakers across disciplines, the Events programme brings poignant and prescient discussions to the foreground through moving image works from across the globe and the history of cinema. The events include a rare chance to see the early comedy shorts of TV Burp icon Harry Hill in Holidays on Mars, screening from original 16mm prints in the BFI Southbank’s NFT1. Nelly Ben-Hayoun curates Alien Extravaganza: a queer, colourful, experimental galaxy of new short-filmmaking. Representing the taboo on-screen erotica, curators Helena and Harlan Whittingham, the team behind Sinéad O’Dwyer’s infamous London Fashion Week presentation, Lover Management, present their own debauched evening film programme, Dark Fantasies. Screenings will also underscore London’s urgent crises of rising gentrification and so-called “regeneration”, a severe shortage of affordable housing in a rapidly expanding city (with artists and curators Ed Webb-Ingall & Oliver Dixon) and powerful expressions of Black and queer cultures from Waywaad Collective, and Lauren Gee’s Everywhere We Are Islands, focused on new voices in Caribbean filmmaking). Young cinema-goers can discover programmes of Soviet Children’s Animation and family-friendly films from Offbeat Film Club.
In addition, film critic and curator Cici Peng will present Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution! exploring Pop’s influence on counter-culture, as well as its power to obscure and distract - featuring global experimental moving-image works from 1968 to the present day, with a pop party at the ICA lasting all night. Action-loving creative platform Babes with Blades will also present short films focused on female representation in the action genre as part of the nationwide BFI Art of Action season.
LSFF 2025: championing radical, innovative filmmaking and the future of independent cinema.
