The London Short Film Festival is now in its 16th year with an ever burgeoning collection of short films and one offs competing for the movie goer’s attention. The festival began life as the Halloween Short Film Festival with the first event held at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) on the Mall.
In 2008 the festival changed its name to the London Short Film Festival and the event has been growing in popularity and prestige ever since.
With Gerry Maguire joining the LSFF team as Festival Producer for the 2018 Festival, the festival looks set for another exceptional year with up to 10,000 film goers expected to visit the LSFF during January.
This year’s festival will play host to over 500 films drawn from over 2500 submissions by short film makers. Besides the short films, a plethora of special events will keep fans entertained throughout the ten day festival. The festival’s opening gala, The Eighties, will pay tribute to the decade that saw the first tentative filmmaking footsteps of Harry Potter’s David Yates, Sally Potter and Clio Barnard and Andrew Kötting.
On Monday 14th January 2019 the Regent’s Street Cinema will play host to a celebration of female short film making. The Female Lens will focus on the work of the brilliant Illuminatrix, a collective of female cinematographers, who began life in 2016 in order to offer an easy way of uncovering the work of female film makers. Several of the Illuminatrix will take to the stage after the screening for a Q&A session.
Then on the 17th of January, the ICA will present a screening and “roundtable revisiting” of academic Stuart Hall’s It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum. The film was produced for the BBC and shown in the early 1980s but Hall’s deconstruction of racism remains as pertinent today and the film will be used as a major conversation point in a panel discussion chaired by Dr Clive Nwonka (LSE).
Finally, on Sunday the 20th of January, the same venue will present Behind The Wall: Short Films From The GDR which will look at some of the subversive films made in the German Democratic Republic in the years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Phantoms looks at the “ephemeral and the forgotten”, Why Make a Film About These People looks at the lives of the desperate youth of Prenzlaur Berg whilst the third film, Nude Photography, investigates and assesses the work of photographer of Gundula Schulze.
The festival is held across a series of iconic film venues across the capital including the aforementioned ICA, the BFI Southbank, the Rio Cinema in Dalston and the Curzon Soho.
For more information about the London Short Film Festival, please click here.
For more information about cinema in London, please click here.
