This is an incredibly powerful and immersive short film that draws the viewer into a childhood experience of dreams, memories, and trauma. The use of mixed media creates a striking contrast between two worlds, resonating deeply with the festival’s theme of comfort and disturb and allowing us to feel the experiences alongside the filmmaker.

Gail Aldam
Mental Health Foundation
International FIlm Awards Jury

My Dying Place is a short documentary about a life shaped by trauma – but what a wonderful life. Its protagonist Patrick lives in a ramshackle house in remote coastal town in New Zealand, surrounded by the animals he rescues and nurtures. First-time director Loren Jalyn Kett gently explores the painful memories that disturb him and the mental health challenges he has always faced, but emphasises the joy he takes in everything he has experienced and everyone he has lost and found. An extraordinary film, impossible not to love.

Rob Dickie
Mental Health Foundation
Film Curator

Dreamscapes is an brisk and enthusing experiment expressing the inexplicabilities that go on in an complexly traumatised and injured head. An inclusive and creative collaboration between director Rachel Gray, performer Amelia Rose Griffin and the Ottawa based Ghost Rooster Collective, the film is bubbling over with vivid sound and colours, glamourous bodies, infecting joy and the invitation to acknowledge your mental health as strength and a shifting inner reality.

Dr Tobias Dietrich
Film Curator and Scholar
International FIlm Awards Jury

Roll Down the Window was the first time I witnessed the urgent and uncompromising honesty in telling a personal and collective story of racialised trauma. It’s a raw and unapologetic portrayal of the filmmaker’s open conversation that, for me, speaks to the rage carried through generations of dehumanisation. What a relief—what a necessary release—to see this told so boldly, with nothing held back.

Nina Abeysuriya
Tiny Changes
International Film Awards Jury

DIAGNONSENSE drew me in from its very first frame. Through personal narrative and imaginative use of archive, the film invites the audience to connect a personal journey with a critical look at psychiatric structures. Created with raw honesty and a compassionate lens, the film encourages reflection without preaching, allowing viewers to feel, question, and reconsider what it truly means to live beyond a diagnosis.

Bircan Birol
Filmmaker
International FIlm Awards Jury

I found We Can Still Hear You to be a powerful and raw documentary experience. Flitting between present day road trip footage, home video archive, and depictions of static, the film’s contradictions in style mirror the busy, restless mind in mental health struggles and OCD in particular. The filmmaker’s voice over provides a personal and emotional narrative that weaves the content together, but also raises wider, existential questions about nature/nurture and mental health.

Scott McPherson
Robert Gordon University
International Film Awards Jury

Carefully crafted and powerfully poetic, Pirsas is dedicated to the filmmaker’s late brother, Junior, who lost his life in a natural disaster in the Colombian Andes. Angélica María Torres Tamayo and her mother retrace Junior’s last hike, exploring various manifestations of grief: raw pain, fading memories, silences, and separations. As mother and daughter ascend the mountain, they examine how loss impacted them differently. At the summit, the same elements that took a loved one away offer repair and connection.

Paola Debellis Alvarez
Filmmaker
International FIlm Awards Jury

In The Key, Theo Panagopoulos has created an intimate, moving meditation on memory, grief, and identity. When Linda returns to her Glasgow childhood home after her estranged Palestinian father’s death, she is confronted – literally – by her 10-year-old self, who leads her through the echoes of a fractured past. Delicately balancing magical realism and a deeply human story, Panagopoulos captures the disorienting experience of diasporic grief and the way loss can reopen questions of belonging. Beautifully acted and delicately composed, The Key finds it’s magic in the tender, haunted spaces between generations.

Michael Lee Richardson
Mental Health Foundation
Festival Programmer