As is tradition, we asked the team to pick a short film that resonated with them this year. The standard of filmmaking we saw in 2025 continues to reaffirm our belief in film as a tool of collective resistance, action, liberation and artistic expression. Thank you to every filmmaker who submitted a film, and to each and every person who turned out to watch one. We can’t wait to welcome you for our 19th edition, which runs from 18-22 March 2026.
Water Sports
Dir. Whammy Alcazaren
“For me 2025 was a year in which the value or impact of a film was often tied inextricably to its screening location. In May I saw the results of Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn’s residency at Alchemy Film Festival in Hawick. On Weaving was a meditative 16mm portrait of Peter Wormsley’s modernist home for textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein, situated just up the road near Selkirk, which also reflected on the legacy of the textile industry for which the Borders is world-renowned. In September I had the privilege of serving on the competition jury at Minikino Film Week, Bali, where the righteous anger of Beny Kristia’s When the Blues Goes Marching In spoke to the generational cycle of protest and repression in Indonesia. But for its bamboozling burning-images-on-your-retina brilliance, the short that has stuck with me this year is Filipino director Whammy Alcazaren’s Water Sports, in which two sad boys harness the power of their love to try and survive a world devastated by climate change. It is beautiful, horrific, playful and deadly serious – its contrariness and humour are deployed to greater effect than any po-faced eco-doc narrated by a gravelly-voiced A-lister.”
Matt Lloyd, Festival Director
Just Above the Tear Duct on Each Side
Dir. Éiméar McClay; Cáit McClay
“An impressive addition to a growing body of inquiry by Cáit and Éiméar McClay, this is the short that has haunted me the most this year since catching at Docs Ireland back in July. Part of this is certainly how close to home it feels, St. Conal’s Psychiatric Hospital being about an hour from where I grew up in Donegal. Ghostly reflections skate over the glassy, grimy surfaces of this meticulously recreated digital space, characterised as a ‘repository for social problems’. The patient rhythm and drizzly soundscape provides an intimate, soporific bedding for the slow-drip horror of treatment records, this balance imbuing the work with a necessary empathy. Exploring 19th & 20th Century psychiatric care in Ireland as (among other things) a technology of expropriation, it is always clear that this is not a work of merely mining the archives for trauma, but of re-humanising those instrumentalised by families, communities and institutions to serve colonial and capitalist logic.”
Oisín Kealy, Programme Manager
Empty Rider
Dir. Lawrence Lek
“Signing off Lawrence Lek’s ‘Smart City’ trilogy, Empty Rider follows rogue car Vanguard-3181’s trial for attempted murder of their parent company’s CEO. Set in the hyperdigital world of SimBeijing—where self-driving cars are mass created, trained, and expected to comply with corporate quality standards—this final chapter outwardly probes into legal quandaries around AI and its juridical liability in case of crimes, while it obliquely comments on technocratic control and misplaced structural accountability. Generational trauma and a Butlerian reflection on what constitutes an expendable life in the face of an extractive, mercenary society cement this film as an acute apologue, if not just a prescient account of an ever so near future.”
Ren Scateni, Curatorial Lead
Their Eyes
Dir. Lawrence Lek
Dir. Nicolas Gourault
“‘Some things seem [so] impossible [that] when they happen, you just wonder how they happened.‘ Nicolas Gourault’s experimental hybrid animation-documentary is a stark reminder that Silicon Valley magic is often predicated on the exploitation of workers in the Global South. Kenyan and Venezuelan freelancers narrate the painstaking process of training autonomous vehicles by annotating masses of photographic data for their AI algorithms. Repurposed footage of their eerie, fluorescent labelling interface takes on a dreamlike quality (think ‘CAPTCHA test on acid’) which is at odds with the cold, hard facts of modern slavery being carried out by the tech bros pretending to be our friends. A timely reminder to look beyond AI’s shiny PR rollout and resist the creep of technofeudalism. Their Eyes received a special mention from the prize jury for the Bill Douglas Award for International Short Film at GSFF25, and quite right too.”
Louis Cammell, Marketing Manager
Freak
Dir. Claire Barnett
“Claire Barnett’s Freak deftly confronts its protagonists’ relationship with religion, gender identity and sexuality when Laney confides in her partner about a sexual fantasy – “the archetypal man”, Jesus Christ. I have our festival-goers to thank for bringing this film to my attention. I first watched Freak during the GSFF 2025 awards ceremony, where it received the International Audience Award. Shot in the style of a home movie, the film’s documentary feel lands us in a place of discomfort and intrigue. Its draw becomes unmistakable when the camera is laid down to meet the duvet’s thread count while the intimate conversation continues offscreen. Visible in the frame or not, the sincerity in the performances held my attention without slipping. The success of Freak lies in this naturalism, and, undoubtedly, in the Marvin Gaye-soundtracked Jesus Christ strip tease.”
Laurie Corewyn, Marketing Coordinator
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
Dir. Lesley Loksi Chan
“Process is both subject and method in Lloyd Wong, Unfinished, an experimental documentary built from a film Lloyd Wong began making about his life with AIDS in 1990s Toronto, before his death left it unfinished for decades. Lesley Loksi Chan approaches Wong’s raw footage not as material to be completed, but as a collaboration across time, with Wong positioned firmly as co-director. Hesitations, corrections and research notes are left visible, allowing the act of trying to understand another’s life and work to become the film’s emotional drive. Rough, warm and frequently playful, the film finds humour alongside its gravity. Incompletion here is not framed as loss alone, but as a space for collective memory and ongoing dialogue. An act of intergenerational witnessing rather than archival closure. I was lucky enough to see the premiere at Berlinale this year, where it received the Golden Bear for Best Short Film and, arguably more importantly, a Teddy Award. Especially apt in an award ceremony shared with Todd Haynes, whose Safe (1995) remains to me as one of the most incisive cinematic reckonings with the AIDS pandemic.”
Carina NicHaouchine, Guest Coordinator
If you haven’t already, sign up to our newsletter to keep up to date with all things GSFF.
Copyright (C) 2025 Glasgow Short Film Festival. All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
Glasgow Short Film Festival
The Forest of Black
1st Floor Rear, Grainstore
60 Tradeston Street
Glasgow G5 8BH