Film Programme 2025
Across the weekend of Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st September 2025, audiences can experience eight feature-length programmes, each a curated journey through the artistry, storytelling, and imagination of short film.
This year’s lineup includes two Animation programmes alongside Change, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Music Video, and Student Film - offering a rich spectrum of perspectives, from laugh-out-loud moments to thought-provoking explorations of the world we share.
Official Selection
Animation 1
Return, reshape, and let go. Profound voyages and altered states take centre stage in this set of extraordinarily imaginative and masterful animations. Taking us to techno clubs, coastal villages, and fantasy cruises, the films in Animation 1 invite us to lose - and sometimes find - ourselves in enchanting moments of connection, collapse, and reinvention.
Saturday 20th September, 2.30pm
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Animation 2
From Prague’s chaotic streets to a sweltering motel at the end of the world, the remarkable shorts in Animation 2 crackle with offbeat humour, strange metamorphoses, and daring inner journeys. Experience a visionary mix of cosmic cravings, cursed dates, balding brothers and bottled-up longing - all told through the limitless shape-shifting power of animation.
Sunday 21st September, 12.30pm
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Change
Spanning oil spills in Mauritius, choices faced by lost youth, and the profound cost of war, the momentous films in this year's Change programme bear witness to urgent issues affecting the world today. From expanding cities to political protest, these stories ask what a better future should look like, testament to our enduring hope for repair, return, and resistance.
Sunday 21st September, 4pm
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Comedy
Through oddball encounters, digital delusions, and awkward romances, this year's Comedy programme revels in the art of getting it gloriously, hilariously wrong. Whether it's telemarketers, unsolicited choirs, or having to reclaim your identity from a viral Vegas doppelgänger, these films find humour in the strange ways humans combine, clash, and try to make sense of each other.
Saturday 20th September, 4.25pm
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Documentary
This year’s Documentary programme tunes into intimate reckonings and astonishing revelations through global perspectives and singular encounters. Featuring distant workers training self-driving cars, influencers raised on camera, and challenges in a Tokyo classroom, these films ask what it really means to be seen, heard, and understood in an increasingly mediated world.
Sunday 21st September, 5.50pm
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Drama
Ruptures of the personal and political ripple through this year’s Drama programme, revealing stolen childhoods, fleeting romances, and acts of moral courage. Amid mysterious natural disasters and intoxicating World Cup fever, characters face turning points that can't be undone. An exploration of our seismic inner and outer worlds, with raw emotion and monumental stakes.
Saturday 20th September, 6.15pm
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Music Video
Aliens fall in love, sculptors lose control, and talking bugs go noir in this mind-melting Music Video programme. A dazzling collision of sound and story, the emotional and the experimental; expect a maximalist, mischievous lineup of genre-defying artists who push pulsating visuals, extraordinary performances and breathtaking style to the outer edges - then leap past them.
Sunday 21st September, 2.30pm
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Student Film
Future, identity, memory and myth collide in these daring shorts from the next generation of filmmakers, who find extraordinary meaning in the everyday and the uncanny. From storm-chasing inventors and glacial pilgrimages to professional mourners and sisterly bonds, this year’s Student Film programme brims with emotional depth, award-winning talent, and fresh cinematic vision.
Saturday 20th September, 12.30pm
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Venue
The Smalls Film Festival takes place at Curzon Hoxton.
Located in the heart of Shoreditch, Curzon is minutes from Old St. station (London Underground), as well as Hoxton and Shoreditch High St. stations (London Overground).
55 Pitfield St, London, N1 6BU
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