Ben Stoll: Conjured Realities, Tainted Objects
Derick Armah: London Lives
The ‘London Lives’ London Short Film Festival programme establishes a reality that long-time Londoners and visitors alike will recognise; that for a city of almost nine million, London can feel a lot smaller than it is. The city is always watching; its citizens always reacting, in some fashion, to its gaze. Whether this ought to be regarded as intimacy or intrusion is a matter of perspective, but there’s little doubt that London’s very physical construction encourages a sense of immediacy within a vast space. It’s a remarkable walkable city, diced by roads and canals that form concrete-lined arteries, connecting near to far. At the turn of a street corner, space can appear to spontaneously contract.
Najrin Islam: Marching Forward, Looking Back
Where Does The Line Go? A tool of measurement, partition, and reorganisation, the border is the product of a colonial episteme. In its arbitrary porosity, the border has historically legitimised the seizure of land, the resettlement of populations, and the transfer of resources in an asymmetric network of power. What if we separated the border from the territory and inspected it as its own unique thing? What we end up with, then, is the line. Separated from its ascribed political weight, the line triggers new architectures of thought in the way it divides or restructures space. Could the line be bent, folded, or confused into a knot? Could it travel across geo-temporal coordinates? Could it contract, distend, or snap on provocation? Does the line only travel in one direction?
Cindy Ziyun Huang: Housing Problems
‘We cling, but it is you who fear, who must be kept apart from members of your species who are not your family. We rest our edges on walls of bricks, transferring our load, the load of you and your possessions. You have no plan for us after this. Your thoughts will crumble with us.’ Catriona Shine, Habitat
Miranda Mungai: Ruins Full of Futures
"Therefore, in the following decade, the stupor and uneasiness must be followed, abruptly, by a moment of cognitive availability to revoke old beliefs and to cling to new ones where it is considered feasible to find solutions to anxieties and needs. It will be the moment of crystallization of a new system of beliefs that restores a new meaning to historical time. And that relaunches the passing of social time.” Politics at the Gateway of Nothingness: Liminal Times, Álvaro García Linera
Esmé Holden: Auto-Mythologies
I think we all trust the images we are shown a lot less than we used to. It seems impossible not to after the promises of the information age metastasised into mediums of uninterpretable scale and mass deception. The idea that there is some concrete, collective truth has been shattered into tiny pieces. And so it’s only natural that these six shorts, each a shard of this broken mirror, obscure, or perhaps reveal the obscurity of, the line between documentary and fiction.
Laura Bivolaru: All We Have of the House
Screening the Ghosts: Film, Memory, and the Meaning of Home Let your mind in peace, don’t mix things up.
Najrin Islam: Absent(ed) Images
The act of watching films is already spectral in that the images on screen are indexically anchored in the past. The faces, places and frames belong to distinct moments in time. Their appearance on screen gestures to an essential veracity while implying an evolving trajectory outside the immediate diegesis. But what happens when the act of watching these images is accompanied by the knowledge that the index has been irrevocably erased? What future is the image denied?
Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh: Akinola Davies Jr.'s Rapt
Rapt (October, 2022) is a Kokoroko music film directed by Akinola Davies Jr. The film immerses the audience in the fascinating hustle and bustle of life in Makoko, Lagos: a water-front community considered one of the African continent’s most unique inner-city slums.
Lucy Peters I: Zodiac x Four Chambers
The London Short Film Festival emerged with a provocative collaboration of curation between Zodiac Film Club and female-led erotic production company Four Chambers, suitably screened in the experimental centrifuge of the ICA.
Lucy Peters II: A Trick of the Light/Señor Internet
A Trick Of The Light was the final competition category in LSFF’s four showcases of promising short filmmaking talent. Centred on AI manipulation and concepts of illusion, projection and memory, this programme was tied together through a study of the fallible nature of the visual image – within the functional world of the film narrative and addressing the very fictionality of filmmaking itself.
Shakara: Response
I. Welcome to the TerrorDomeThat tick tick ticking metronomeBides timeStories spoken stories toldAs we gather roundAncient magic amongst us growsWhere two or three are gathered in the midst I roamDivine takes form and expresses blessingsSpeaking truths embedded messageSteam levitating concretePutrid flesh perfuming city streetsVictory shy victims meet exchanging hymns in mundane speakRaging consumptions nourish meRaising hell to eye levelSoul’s cry out it’s terminalThe first shall be last and the last shall be firstLet your words pepper tonguesBurn eyes in re-verseSpeak now.
Loann Hutchinson: A Response to The Space Belongs to Them
The programme opens with a documentary (Statues Hardly Ever Smile, 1971) filmed inside the Brooklyn Museum. A group of school children are invited to spend a week improvising a series of drama performances, inspired by objects found inside the museum. The narrator tells us that, by the end of the week, the children feel as though the museum belonged to them.
Derick Armah: Response
Introduced through gentle tones emanating from Makella Ama’s singing bowl, and then culminating with a poetry recital from Raheela Suleman, the director of SABR (2023) The Space Belongs To Them opens and closes through rhythmic sound.
Nathaniel Weisberg: A Granite Lover
The programs Acre After Acre: Mile After Mile and The Southall Shift at this year’s London Short Film Festival presented visions of two ostensibly very different parts of the city.
Cindy Ziyun Huang: Daydream House
We are in an empty house. Through window blinds, bright sunlight dances on walls and makes shifting reflections. Our eyes pan across the grainy white walls.Their expansive blankness turns the vacated house into an abstract shadow (Isabelle Tollenaere,The Fruit Tree, 2022). We are sleepwalking in a stranger’s daydream.