By Genevieve Dammery
After three weekends of independent cinema, emerging talent and filmmaker conversations, the South London Film Festival brought its 2026 edition to a close at Brixton’s Picturehouse Ritzy with She Owns the Scene Vol. 2, a celebratory final programme placing women at the centre of the screen.
After a tribute to George Major, the Pearly King of Peckham (and subject of SLFF finalist Pearls of Wisdom), the closing selection brought together eleven films spanning comedy, drama, experimental filmmaking with stories of migration, grief, identity, family, and female autonomy. These are films that place women at the heart of their stories, and equally importantly, celebrates women taking creative control behind the camera.
Women behind and in front of the camera
Among the most high-profile selections was How to Hide It, co-directed Olympian Ramla Ali and Richard A. Moore, with Idris and Sabrina Elba serving as executive producers. The film follows Zahra, a British-Sudanese Muslim woman who wins the lottery and is suddenly forced to confront the religious implications of her fortune and how she can explain her change in circumstances to her traditional family. Joan Iyiola’s MANGO, executive produced by BAFTA-winning actor Wunmi Mosaku, follows Zadie, an independent florist privately living with fibroids while preparing for a potentially career-changing opportunity. The film explores the extent to which the body can become an obstacle to the life that we try to build.
Leaving home, grief, memory, and the things we carry
Several of the closing films turn their attention inward. Sculpted is Hannah Collins’ experimental short exploring memory, connection, and the past. Juliette Rose Mercier’s A Hundred and Fifteen Times Yes! shifts the focus somewhere futuristic. In a near-future world, a lonely man uses an advanced AI and virtual reality service to repeatedly relive a perfect proposal.
One of the programme’s most moving films is Rashida Seriki’s Leaving Ikorodu in 1999, a BIFA-longlisted short starring Sheila Atim, Tobi Bakre and Tomi Ojo. The film follows ten-year-old Momo as she is driven to the airport to leave Nigeria and reunite with her mother in London.
Comedy, darkness, and the unexpected
Importantly, She Owns the Scene isn’t relentlessly serious. Florence Poppy Deary’s With You Always, is a delightfully funny imagining of the aftermath of losing a loved one. Gan Canny, directed by Lou Burns and Aaron Burns, embraces dark comedy as two siblings, unhappy with the arrangements for their grandmother’s funeral, steal the hearse and embark on one final road trip with their Nana.
When She Sings, meanwhile, moves decisively into stranger territory. Set in a British seaside town, Paul Holbrook’s film follows a talented artist haunted by a sinister mermaid and terrorised by a group of bizarre locals. Starring and co-written by Laura Bayston, it is one of the programme’s more surreal films. In contrast, Nash Edgerton’s Candy Bar follows a man’s interaction with a young girl waiting in a queue for a cinema candy bar. When the girl decides the man looks like her father, things take a strange and humorous turn.
The programme closed with Lee Knight’s Oscar-nominated A Friend of Dorothy, which brings intergenerational friendship and queer identity into the programme with a refreshing warmth. Its inclusion also reinforces one of the strongest qualities of South London Film Festival: the programme does not attempt to present one definitive version of our human experiences. The stories woven throughout the festival can be political, funny, painful or deeply personal, sometimes all at once.
A festival interested in voices, not formulas
The closing programme also included Ava Bounds’ deeply moving We Are Here, Still, a visual tribute to the stolen childhoods of Gaza and the children who should be free to laugh, play, and grow. Its presence alongside more fantastical stories demonstrates once again the breadth of the festival’s ambitions. Throughout its 2026 programme, the South London Film Festival has repeatedly gravitated towards stories concerned with people negotiating circumstances beyond their control, whether that is grief, migration, inequality, identity, or social expectations.
Yet the festival has avoided turning those subjects into a single house style, and this is what has made it such a success. The programme included everything from a Jordan Peele-backed horror short, to a BAFTA-winning animation, to documentaries about South London communities, psychological dramas, music videos and socially conscious filmmaking.
A fitting finale
There is something truly satisfying about ending the festival with She Owns the Scene Vol 2. South London Film Festival’s ethos is built around giving filmmakers a platform rather than imposing a rulebook on what they should create. The closing programme embodies that philosophy.
These films do not all look alike. They do not all sound alike. They are not interested in answering the same questions. What connects them is the confidence to tell stories from perspectives that deserve to be seen.
After three weekends at the Ritzy, it feels like the most fitting conclusion to this year’s festival. South London Film Festival has demonstrated that independent cinema does not need to be defined by scale. A short film can tackle grief, migration, misogyny, technology, identity, or family in a matter of minutes and still leave an audience with something to wrestle with long after the credits roll.
Ultimately, it captures what the strongest festival programming should do. It should introduce us to filmmakers we may not have encountered before, challenge the assumptions we bring into the cinema, and leaves us hungry to see what these filmmakers do next.
As the lights came up on the final screening and the festival gathered for its closing celebrations, She Owns the Scene Vol. 2 provided a fitting final reminder of what the South London Film Festival has championed throughout its 2026 edition: new voices, distinctive perspectives, and filmmakers given the freedom to make their own rules.
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