By Genevieve Dammery
The South London Film Festival opened its sixth edition this weekend at The Ritzy, bringing two very different programmes of short filmmaking to the screen. Across Saturday’s Official Awards Showcase and Sunday’s Behind the Smile Vol 1 programme, the festival presented an impressive breadth of work from horror to social satire, animation, documentary and more.
South London Film Festival does not impose a single identity on independent cinema, it presents a space for experimentation, resulting in a programme united by a willingness to tackle difficult subjects without ever losing sight of entertainment.
Saturday: Award-winning shorts with plenty to say
Saturday’s Official Awards Showcase set the tone with 15 films spanning an unusually broad range of genres and subjects. The programme included the UK premiere of Spilled Milk, directed by Jared Leaf and executive produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions; Aneil Karia’s Vote Gavin Lyle; the BAFTA-winning animation Two Black Boys in Paradise; Dian Weys’ Vultures; The Pigs Underneath, directed by Charlie Dennis; Olly Ginelli’s TheLong Spring, and more.
One of the most striking aspects of the programme was its willingness to confront social and political issues without reducing the films to simple messages. The Pigs Underneath used disturbing world of quotas and punishment to explore inequality and class oppression with a visceral quality that allowed its political ideas to land without becoming didactic. Two Black Boys in Paradise demonstrated the emotional possibilities of animation. Based on Dean Atta’s poem, the BAFTA-winning short brings questions of race, masculinity, sexuality and violence into a beautiful visual world.
Beloved Bermondsey was a love letter to a South London community facing change and regeneration, while the inclusion of Dave’s The Boy Who Played the Harp demonstrated the increasingly blurred boundary between cinema and music.
There was also a welcome sense of ambition. Several films operated on a scale far beyond what their running times might suggest, while others embraced the freedom of the short form to tell stories that left the audience wishing for a few more minutes at the end.
The programme culminated in a Q&A and awards ceremony, followed by networking at the Ritzy, and by the end we could not wait to see what Sunday would bring!
Sunday: Behind the Smile Vol. 1
If Saturday demonstrated the breadth of the festival, Sunday provided the emotional centre. Presented in collaboration with the Film and TV Charity, Behind the Smile Vol. 1 brought together ten films connected by themes of grief, vulnerability, and identity.
Where Saturday frequently looked towards politics, society and the wider world, Sunday explored what happens internally, examining the private experiences that can remain invisible behind ordinary lives.
Alex Lanipekun’s Echoes, which received its UK premiere, presented the story of a successful businessman whose unexpected reunion with a homeless childhood friend forces him to confront buried memories from his past. The Intimacy Coordinator, meanwhile, took a more unconventional route, following an intimacy coordinator who grapples with sex addiction.
There was also room for humour and absurdity. The Snip, for example, approached questions of fertility and masculinity through a comic premise, while Black Cab used a near-future London setting to explore a man’s struggle to understand his place in a rapidly changing world.
At the other end of the spectrum was An Ode to Joy, which received its world premiere. Directed by Ashleigh Ashley and starring Rudolph Walker, the film follows Hezekiah after the death of his wife Joy as he attempts to continue the rituals and routines of their shared life. Its focus on love and grief offered one of the weekend’s most poignant reminders that loss does not necessarily mean abandoning the life that came before it, and that humour can exist alongside pain.
The Wolf, starring Kellie Shirley, approached psychological distress through an abusive relationship, while The Proudest Rose explored grief and recovery through its protagonist’s attempt to find connection after her father’s death. Far From the Plains, likewise, placed a young person at the centre of a story about depression, loss and finding hope in unexpected places, and Bobby, set against the backdrop of Dunkirk in 1940, showed a young man undertaking an act of defiance and courage to save another person’s life.
The result was a programme that asked what it means to carry experiences that aren’t immediately visible to other people, and what happens when those experiences finally surface.
A festival built around conversation.
Both programmes were followed by opportunities to hear from the filmmakers, with Sunday’s discussion hosted by South London Film Festival founder and CEO Kyriakos Georgiou and Marcus Ryder, CEO of the Film and TV Charity.
After two days, the overriding impression is of a festival that genuinely wants to discover and champion filmmakers, with a clear appetite for ambitious ideas and emerging talent.And if the first weekend is anything to go by, the South London Film Festival has started its 2026 edition with a programme that gives its filmmakers something to say and its audiences plenty to talk about.
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