As London gets colder, the BFI launches London Film Festival, an 11-day blaze that warms Southbank with new cinema. Classed into their ever-enigmatic categories, there’s something for everyone, from Julia Ducournau to Sergei Loznitsa. Bookending these are Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero. But while these are the highlights, the minor players deserve just as much praise. In between the flashy, two-hour epics is the Experimenta programme.
Hosting one artist working in experimental film a month, Experimenta brings balance to the BFI’s programming throughout the year. LFF is seemingly no different, with a range of features and short films from across the globe.
Refusing to shy away from big issues, the pithy shorts in this section examine topics like memory and borders (physical and otherwise). Within each strand, filmmakers explore issues of imaging racism (Another Other, Bex Oluwatoyin Thompson). They touch on colonialism in the archive (Nsala, Mickael-sltan Mbanza), and the history of online extremist propaganda (Afterlives, Kevin B. Lee). ‘Like all forms of art,’ BFI Shorts Programmers told mov.r, ‘film can be a mirror of society. As with many artists, filmmakers take from what is around them.’ In an increasingly politicised and digitised world, speaking out seems to go hand-in-hand with pushing the formal boundaries of expression.
And push boundaries they do: Zhenia Stepanenko’s Hedgehog Cakes: Sweet Weapon of Terror tells the story of Stalin’s secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov as a true-crime mockumentary, while household name Alice Diop explores the representations of black women in Western art that feels like a conversation with paintings themselves in Fragments For Venus. ‘We want our audiences to go into these programmes with an open mind,’ say the programmers. ‘Some of the ideas may be challenging or surprising, but we feel the short film space is a great way to discover new ideas and new ways of telling stories.’
As one moves down the lineup, the directly political films, or at least directly allegorical films like Border as Interface Petra Szemán and Ka Bad Ddi: a breath, a move, a game (Alia Syed), meet with the more formless. Gabi Dao’s vampiric Resurrect Me As A Parasite is nothing but a wild ride through the supernatural. Half Memory, Ufuoma Essi’s Toni Morrison-based essay film, leaves room for audiences to contemplate its themes of generational memory.
Indeed, some use their freedom to present ideas and themes from different parts of the world. Adam Piron’s The Early Sun, Red as a Hunter’s Moon tracks the coded letters of Kiowa student Belo Cozad, as he tries to evade colonial censorship. Natasha Tontey’s Primate Visions; Macaque Macabre explores the boundaries between humans and ecology through indigenous Indonesian perspectives.
‘We came to this selection from hundreds and hundreds of submissions,’ the programmers explain, ‘it’s impossible to choose [a favourite]!’ Moviegoers can enjoy the thrill of the main event screenings, providing the usual blockbuster experiences that the BFI provides. But they can also venture into uncharted territory with this extensive line-up, wherever their interests lie. ‘The aim is always to showcase the highest quality of up-and-coming filmmakers,’ a mantra that undoubtedly extends into Experimenta, where the weight of the world is being tackled every half an hour by tomorrow’s stalwart film artists.
BFI London Film Festival runs from 8th to the 19th October 2025. To find out more, visit their website.
Image: Afterlives (2025, dir. Kevin B. Lee) © BFI
