A showcase of the best in new experimental short film. Expect drama toying with convention, choreographed dance pieces and manipulated found video footage.

PORTRAIT - Harriet Wallace / Flo Wallace (9 mins)
A Victorian photographer takes a portrait of a mother and child, interrogating and elaborating on exposure time. Society’s fascination with photography has endured since its birth to the modern day, with our consumptive photo-centric society, and the selfie. Portrait explores ideas of representation, performance, portraiture, and the photograph itself.

ON LOCATION - Kayla Parker (13 mins)
A hybrid form of landscape cinema capturing the year of an unnamed hollow way that forms the stream bed for several springs in a remote area of rural mid-Devon. Made in collaboration with the cinematographer and sound recordist Stuart Moore, the film takes time to notice the human and non-human traces of change along the sunken lane.

IN BETWEEN TAKES - Alexei Dmitriev (8 mins)
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a video camera, and you will have a film in twenty years.

IS IT SAFE - Becky Hollis (13 mins)
A radio crackles between two public service announcements. They offer advice on home safety and outdoor summer safety. A young girl sits doodling on her kitchen floor, listening intently. Her imagination is sparked. The radio signals blur. Twisted warnings are conjured up in crayon fantasy. We fuzz across the boundary between mind and world as safety instructions become life threatening.

ONE DIVING, ONE FALLING - Harry Cauty (4 mins)
Written and choreographed by Daisy Cauty and Martha Canning, directed by Harry Cauty. Reflecting on a time when women were considered to have a mental illness for expressing themselves creatively through dance, this film explores vulnerability, delusion and insanity, combined with passion, artistry and beauty, giving the suppressed women of the twentieth century a life of performance in the present.

UNDERCURRENT - Anne Verheij (4 mins)
We find ourselves uncomfortably up close with a dancer on screen. Are we allowed to possess her? She is oblivious to her spectators. When the momentum changes she starts to move, aware she is no longer alone. On the verge of losing possession of her body she takes control and begins encroaching on the spectators like a predator stalking its prey.

RHYTHM OF BEING - Giada Ghiringhelli (7 mins)
For an instant, I am. The light touches me gently and I live, burst and shine. This constant, irreversible, rhythmic drift from being to not. Only the memories left. Escaping desires. The love and the pain. I only have an instant of life. So please. This film is an ode to the rhythm of being.

MAYA'S KNIFE - Kris Beaghton (2 mins)
An experimental short inspired by the "vertical cinema" practiced by filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer, drawing on dream logic and surrealist imagery rather than linear temporality and narrative.

VILLAGE ORCHESTRA - Sophie Littman (5 mins)
One level removed from reality, Village Orchestra observes the group dynamics and social codes of a small ensemble as they assemble for a practice. Filtered through an eerie lens, we watch as one girl feels all eyes on her and we are led to question where the line between real and dream is drawn.

SEARCHWITHIN - Chao Heng Yang (3 mins)
SearchWithin is a short film that disrupts visual and ontological perception. Virtual images simulate reality, while reality blends with virtual supplements. They approach each other and meet in the uncanny space: the gap. The gap is like the slit between the wall and the bed, collecting daily dust, hairs and biscuit crumbs without people’s consciousness. The gap, an intermediate space, a spectrum between fact and truth, is where fictional narrative develops its fantasies.

SNOW - Stuart Pound (5 mins)
Agile cross-cutting between images shows animals hunting in the snow. The soundtrack is a Roma song celebrating the coming of spring.

HOLY SPIRIT - Christian Wright (4 mins)
Holy Spirit is part of a trilogy exploring video games as spiritual instruments, derived from the artist’s personal experiences when playing games. Each video in the trilogy uses different techniques to evoke those feelings of transcendence that can be attained - sometimes only for fleeting moments - while playing.

GATES OF ROME - Louis-Jack / Henry Babbage (5 mins)
Gates of Rome explores the power and limits of political gesture in the fractured times we live in. The film casts young, metropolitan hands to act out a range of gestures derived from mainstream politicians and counter-cultural political movements to explore the power and the limits of these gestures today.

TRAINS - Jola Kudela (5 mins)
Everything is a form of vibration, One needs to hear it and transform it into music The world is a piano and the piano is the world The musician becomes the creator of the world.