The London Short Film Festival (LSFF) is going online next year, because there’s no way we can firmly plan for in-person events. Lots of uncertainty remains certain for us in 2021 – but we can at least escape by watching some brilliant new short films from home.
From 15 to 24 January 2021, LSFF will be accessible to audiences beyond London, sharing the nation’s leading short filmmaking curation with audiences throughout the UK, with subtitling across all filmic, recorded and live content.
Embracing visual art experiments, genre-bending documentary, kaleidoscopic animations and more, LSFF’s New Shorts strand will be celebrating 220 globally-made short films, curated from over 5000 open submissions, across its ten days.
The programme includes passion projects from BAFTA winner Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Black Panther) and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed (Four Lions, The Night Of), to innovative moving image from acclaimed monologist Steve Reinke (MoMa, Centre Pompidou), photographer Sohrab Hura (Magnum Photos), Jarman Award nominee Larry Achiampong and animator Wong Ping (Guggenheim, IFFR).
The festival’s Special Events showcase archive gems of radical activism and collective action, rarely screened and now available to UK audiences, whilst panels and workshops see Oscar winner Mark Rylance, Black British cinema pioneer Ngozi Onwurah, digital arts collective Keiken and others in conversation on industry ethics and diversifying the filmmaking community.
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The “collective” is the key theme across the LSFF 2021 programme, with Special Events responding to a socially distanced 2020. Expect a host of global voices and stories, with guest curators Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Festival, documents of direct action and activism from the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Groupe Medvedkine, and solidarity-building documentaries from Palestine and Indigenious reoccupation project, The Unist’ot’en Camp.
Elsewhere, LSFF ventures offline to present a free outdoor installation of looping AV compositions and performance visuals projected onto the side of BFI Southbank. This immersive programme will celebrate the graft and creativity behind the scenes of live gig visuals with work originally created to accompany the Pet Shop Boys, New Order and London Grammar.
This year gone, the film festival industry has had to re-adapt incredibly quickly and with much creativity offering audiences a unique experience from conventional film festival-going.
This edition, LSFF are able to offer 48 hours accessibility to all programmes and more cost-effective pricing. Special Events are priced at £5, New Shorts £4 and industry events free. LSFF are also offering passes to their Competition and Documentary programmes starting from £12. There’s no excuse to not take part this year. Check their website here for tickets and extra info.
