Small but mighty London Short film Festival announces 2025 programme
The London Short film Festival (LSFF) will revive a piece of cinema history as part of its recently announced programme for January 2025.
A 1960’s Mobile Cinema Bus will be coming to Crystal Palace as part of the small but mighty celebration of short film which will run across a series of venues from January 17 to 26.
The free Cinema Bus, originally built to bring films to communities without cinemas, seats 22 viewers.
Travelling through the capital, the bus will stop at Crystal Palace Park, Walthamstow and Hounslow, transforming community spaces into intimate screening venues of brand new films.
The Cinema Bus was inspired by this year’s LSFF theme, “Spaces”, which draws on the disappearing cinemas and social clubs across London.
In the past year, South London has seen the doors of Bromley Picturehouse and Catford Mews – Lewisham’s only cinema – close permanently as a result of increasing operational costs and declining admissions.
LSFF’s 22nd edition will focus on the cost of these losses with a line-up of 204 new short films being screened at venues including BFI Southbank, SET Peckham, ICA, Curzon Soho, Rio Cinema, Rich Mix, Farsight Collective, and even the Brazilian Embassy.
On January 18, SET Peckham in Nigel Road, will host Ruins Full of Futures, a series of short documentaries which look at how cities have changed over the decades.
Through frank conversations, these shorts capture the data centres, shopping centres and luxury apartments which have dawned at the expense of bingo halls, music venues and often, communities.
Whilst the new developments embody progress, Ruins Full of Futures will expose the cost of this promise.
On Janurary 19, Brixton’s Ritzy cinema will welcome Always Been Here, a programme which journeys across London’s streets, scenes, homes and spaces.
Part celebration, part rallying cry, these shorts demonstrate the creativity and talent of Black queer people. Curated by Waywaad Collective.
Representing the taboo on-screen erotica, curators Helena and Harlan Whittingham, offer their own debauched evening film programme, Dark Fantasies.
Elsewhere, you can catch Nelly Ben-Hayoun’s Alien Extravaganza, a queer, colourful, experimental galaxy of new short-filmmaking, early comedy shorts of TV Burp icon Harry Hill in Holidays on Mars as well as walking tours of lost cultural venues.
Young cinema-goers can also discover programmes of Soviet Children’s Animation and family-friendly films from Offbeat Film Club.
To top that all off, film critic and curator Cici Peng will present Pop: Contagion, Infection, Revolution! At ICA Cinema in The Mall, exploring Pop’s influence on counter-culture, as well as its power to obscure. The series will feature experimental films from 1968 to the present day.
Across its 22-year history, LSFF has debuted a number of short films from some of today’s most compelling filmmakers including Luna Carmoon, Rose Glass, Andrea Arnold, Peter Strickland, and Alice Lowe.
The festival’s opening night, on January 16, at Curzon Soho, will host a retrospective of more than two decades’ worth of short films screened at the festival.
To find out more, visit: https://www.shortfilms.org.uk/
Pictured top: Inside the LSFF’s 1960’s Mobile Cinema Bus (Picture: Laurens Parsons Photography)