Feelings of displacement and detachment are expressed in these intimate, authored shorts. Be it through societal pressures or cultural traditions, the situations documented here characterise the sense of unease caused by seemingly impassable divisions between worlds.

Absent Wound
Maryam Tafakory | 2017 | Iran, UK | 10′ | Best UK Short Award Nominee

Persian rituals of warrior training are seen in combination with the recitations of a young girl coming to terms with her impending womanhood.

Ma
Maria Stoianova | 2017 | Ukraine | 17′

Mom is feeding great tits from the window of her high-rise building in Mariupol, and growing queen apples in her summerhouse near the battle line. To show her simple life, she shoots videos on her small camera for her daughter, who lives in the capital and is hard to reach. To try to keep the conversation going, she feeds her overgrown child with morality fables and fairytales.

Landline
Matt Houghton | 2018 | UK | 13′ | Best UK Short Award Nominee

Landline is about the only helpline in the UK for gay farmers. In a world that prizes traditional masculinity and in which ideas of ancestry are fundamental, being gay can be isolating. Suicide rates are extremely high for both young farmers and gay men, and combining these can be a recipe for tragedy. But there are also thriving gay scenes in the most rural of towns; unexpected friendships and relationships; and moments so unlikely that they could only happen in real life. Candid, intimate and shocking, Landline is a snapshot of a group of people bound together by circumstance but so often isolated from each other.

The Haunted
Saodat Ismailova | 2017 | Uzbekistan | 23′

The Haunted is an imaginary encounter with a spirit of an extinct Turkistan tiger that inhabited Central Asia through to the mid-twentieth century – lost as a result of hunting for its skin, and the extermination of river reeds for agricultural repurposing of the land. Today, the Turan Tiger keeps on living in dreams of the local population, representing the land’s soul, a sacred guide or a healer of wounds. The Haunted is an intimate visual letter, or a mourning ritual, for the soul of the last Turan Tiger.

Missed Call
Victoria Mapplebeck | 2018 | UK | 20′ | Best UK Short Award Nominee

How do you reconnect with a father who’s been gone for most of your life? What do you say; what do you write? Shot on an iPhone X, Missed Call explores the relationship between the filmmaker and her teenage son as they work out how to reconnect with his father who’s been absent for a decade. Missed Call explores the ways in which our lives are lived and captured through the phones we hold so close, beginning with the last email his father sent before disappearing abroad in 2006 and ending with the first phone call to him eleven years later.

Season of Goodbyes
Philippa Ndisi-Herrmann | 2018 | Kenya, UK | 14′ | Best UK Short Award Nominee

“The seasons had not decided on their endings and beginnings, so we lived in the space between.” A letter to a loved one exploring the unity and separation that comes with life and loss.

(Total Running Time: 97′)