The London Short Film Festival Announces 2019 Line-Up

The Programme for the 2019 London Short Film Festival has been announced. The festival now in its 16th Year celebrates the best in the UK and international independent short film.

The festival will showcase a diverse range of backgrounds; a huge selection of films stretching across of strands which include music, politics, culture, LGBTQ+ and BAME.

The main focus for the 2019 Programme will be celebrating 1980s culture, including ‘80s agitprop Scratch Video movement with live music from electronic supergroup Wrangler, a rare screening of cult figure John Lurie’s Fishing with John, and a programme of film and performance devised for Air Draft.

It won’t be all Short Films, as they’ll be a special screening of 1982 low-budget horror, Nasty Stuff: Basket Case. The film fits nicely into the programme which was caught up in the UK’s Video Nasty scare, shown on 35mm for extra scares.

Other highlights of the festival include the opening gala Now! That’s What I Call ’80s Short Film, screens the formative calling cards of the decade’s graduating class, now established prolific British directors among the industry’s greats, including Clio Barnard, Andrew Kötting, Sally Potter, and Harry Potter’s David Yates.

Closing night will celebrate the black women redefining Afrofuturism through their electronic experimentation in No Woman Is An Island where Nkisi (UIQ) will be performing an exclusive live premiere ahead of her album launch (7 Directions) in January 2019.

Elsewhere, LSFF looks to the kaleidoscopic music videos of iconoclast Derek Jarman for the likes of The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys and Marianne Faithful, the visual history of underground label Hyperdub with Cooly G, Club des Femmes revisit Pratibha Parmar’s seminal document of black, queer resistance A Place of Rage in the context of Trump and New Queer Visions deliver LGBTQ+ short gems and docs from the world afar.

For more information and the full list of events, head over to shortfilms.org.uk