Official Selection 2025
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.
THREE KEENINGS
Dir: Oliver McGoldrick
Ian is a struggling actor who finds himself in the unconventional role of a professional mourner. As he tours the Northern Irish countryside, his practised mask of apathy begins to slip amongst the humour and heartache of the local funeral circuit.
FAWN
Dir: Molly Mayhew
Following the sudden passing of her parents, Fawn is forced to return to a house she hasn’t called home in a very long time. As painful memories begin to seep through, Fawn is thrown onto the difficult path of reconnecting with a past she thought she had left behind.
LIFE IS LIKE THAT AND NOT OTHERWISE
Dir: Lenia Friedrich
An escargotic exploration of the spaces lived and lost throughout the life of Mrs. Miko, now very old. Her story intertwines with Lenia Friedrich’s own musings on ageing and loss, as well as the imprints and the fractures that are left behind when objects, memories, or names disappear.
MIND THE GAP
Dir: Gwenola Heck
When a city resident vanishes into the earth, a supposed ambulance rushes to the rescue.
CURA SANA
Dir: Lucía G. Romero
On the night of the Spanish festival of San Juan, a routine visit to the food stamp office becomes a turning point for two sisters facing domestic violence at home, as they begin to choose love over harm.
THE SELF AND THE OTHER
Dir: Chen Ma
An experimental film inspired by Sartre's No Exit, where abstract shapes - a square, a triangle, and a circle - explore identity and manipulate audience perception in a surreal, shifting game between Self and Other.
I WALK WHILE GLACIERS MELT
Dir: Lucia Lambarri Barberis
A ritual walk through the Andean mountains and snowy peaks of Cusco, Peru, becomes a personal reflection on transformation and pilgrimage, questioning modernity and our place in a time of melting glaciers, while celebrating the shared journey with others.
AWAITING THE LIGHTNING BOLT
Dir: Marco Russo
In Renaissance Italy, inventor Renato dares to trap lightning in a jar, facing thrilling storms, skeptical peers, and the power of love in an ambitious race against time.
TEA FOR TWO
Dir: Aidana Kuanova
Invited to tea, a woman tumbles through time and memory to rediscover her own voice. Will she emerge with a newfound sense of self, or remain lost in the echoes of the past?
THREE
Dir: Amie Song
At a home gathering, a Chinese woman who has recently moved to the United States to live with her daughter tries to keep her daughter's secrets from her new friends.
THE SHYNESS OF TREES
Dir: Bingqing Shu, Jiaxin Huang, Lina Han, Loïck Du Plessis D’Argentré, Maud Le Bras, Simin He & Sofiia Chuikovska
Hélène visits her ageing mother in the French countryside, only to find that she isn't being her usual self; she seems to have formed a strange bond with the plants, insects, and the old oak tree at the end of her garden.
Official Selection 2025
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