From snow-peaked mountains to surreal dreamscapes, this programme brings together a bold selection of shorts that explore identity, and offer insight into lives often left at the margins.
Blending performance, archive, poetry and surreal images, these films blur the lines between internal and external worlds, making visible that which is often hidden by stigma or silence, and reminding us that every body carries a story.
Filmmakers Zoe Elston (Stripped), Lipa Hussain (Roll Down the Window), Olive Jones (See and Don’t See) and Huss (Until We Return) will join us for a post-screening discussion.
About the Programme
Kopala d. Hugh Francis Anderson, Vetle Sevild (Norway, 2024) 32m
In Arctic Norway’s Kvænangen mountains, snowboarder Krister Kopala prepares for a dangerous first descent. Driven by childhood trauma, he finds refuge in the mountains. Is he seeking presence and life, or a way to be closer to death?
Dreamscapes d. Rachel Gray (Canada, 2025) 13m
A genre-blurring experimental film exploring mental health as a shifting inner reality – painful, beautiful, glamorous and strange. Centring a powerful performance by Amelia Rose Griffin, the film transforms her lived experience into movement, colour, and sound, giving voice to experiences often hidden through shame, stigma and silence.
Stripped d. Zoe Elston (UK, 2023) 15m
Esoteric visuals and archive material provide the backdrop for a conversation between two sisters as they reflect on the experience and impact of hospitalisation. Stripped highlights how a person’s identity as patient might interfere with their sexuality and their experiences of sexual intimacy.
See and Don’t See d. Olive Jones (Scotland, 2024) 5m
Through spoken word and dreamlike imagery, and an ethereal score featuring sounds of the body and placenta, the voices and experiences of single mothers are given space in this intimate and deeply personal experimental short, challenging stereotypical portrayals.
Tank d. Garath Whyte (UK, 2024) 3m
A young woman is placed on display in a tank in this surreal trip into the internal struggles of someone living with chronic illness. The journey emphasises the importance of compassion and understanding for invisible illness.
Roll Down the Window d. Lipa Hussain (Scotland, 2024) 10m
Alice In Wonderland syndrome causes the sensation of shrinking and losing bodily control. Filmmaker Lipa Hussain interrogates the neurological condition she has experienced since childhood and the parallels it represents with her own religious and racial struggles.
Until We Return d. Huss (Scotland, 2025) 11m
Until We Return drifts between memory and myth, moving from the flicker of a sixth birthday on VHS to the final unknowing farewell of a vanished home. The film unfolds like a passage along the Nile, through dreamlike currents of Cairo where memory and presence blur, part vision, part yearning, part possibility. Upon its waters, a fragile utopia awakens, a world where separation never came, where return is still within reach, and the home once lost flows back into being.
