The Bill Douglas Award at Glasgow Short Film Festival showcases new international short films that reflect the qualities found in the work of Scotland’s own Bill Douglas: honesty, formal innovation, and cinematic storytelling that places sound and image centre stage.
Six loosely thematic programmes of international work, comprising fiction, documentary, animation and experimental/artists’ moving image, compete for the Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film and the International Audience Award.
The GSFF25 Bill Douglas Award went to Maryam Tafakory for Razeh-del.
The GSFF25 Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film was decided by a jury including Oana Ghera, Artistic Director of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF); Last year’s Bill Douglas award winner, Iranian underground audiovisual artist Saleh Kashefi; and Fransiska Prihadi, Programme Director of Minikino, a non-profit short film organisation from Indonesia.
The jury said: “A precious cinematic jewel which virtuosically narrates an important but forgotten memory of a nation told through an intimately personal but at the same time politically rebellious perspective which made an impossible film become possible. The artist has dedicated herself to a deeply personal and meticulous research, investigating the vast archives of the dead post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, emancipating and reviving the same films that have been murdered by the censorship authorities. This masterpiece is a testament to the power of personal filmmaking—one that defies not only the borders imposed by governments and the industry but, perhaps most profoundly, the invisible barriers artists place upon their own creativity. It is an absolute pleasure for the jury members to grant the Bill Douglas Award of 2025 to Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del”.
The jury gave a special mention to Nicolas Gourault’s Their Eyes.
The GSFF25 International Audience Award went to Freak by Claire Barnett.