Glasgow Short Film Festival 2025: The Award Winners

Scotland’s annual celebration of short film, the Glasgow Short Film Festival, came to a close this weekend. Despite the major setback of the festival’s usual hub, the CCA, being unavailable due to the venue’s emergency winter hiatus, all accounts suggest this was another lively, funny, brainy, politically sharp edition of the festival. The quality of films taking home prizes at GSFF’s annual awards ceremony certainly speaks to the quality of curation in the competition programmes.

The most in-demand strand at the festival continues to be the Scottish Short Film Competition. A total of 17 homegrown films competed across three screenings, each one sold out long before the festival kicked off. The Scottish Competition jury was made up of writer and artist Joey Simons, film and TV producer Carolynne Sinclair Kidd and Italian programmer Giulio Vita. They picked a doozy for their winning film: Paternal Advice by Edinburgh filmmaker Lisa Clarkson. 

It’s a vivid short exploring the brutality of Scottish masculinity. Shot in stark black and white and taking in the duality of Glasgow, it follows a young working-class father who tries to pass down some advice on life to his estranged son, growing up in a middle-class area of town and seems to have a much more sheltered life. Its visceral depiction of fractured Scottish families and the harsh realities of working-class life calls to mind the shorts of Lynne Ramsay, but there’s also a blackly comic flavour to the film that’s all Clarkson’s own, not least in its bitter slap-in-the-face punchline. The jury called it “a perfect example of the short film form”. While picking up the award, Clarkson gave a shout-out to the great Janice Galloway, on whose short story the film was based, pointing out this was, incredibly, the first-ever film adaptation of Galloway’s work.

Still from Baby by Eubha Akilade

The GSFF audience – which includes votes from inmates of HMP Polmont – also had a strong pick for the Audience Award: Soul by Eilidh Loan. Another father-child story set in a working-class milieu, Soul concerns a young Northern Soul nut who’s having mixed feelings – excitement, fear, guilt – about leaving her tight-knit community in a Scottish small town for art school in London. One final shuffle with her dad and her best pal at the local Northern Soul night while “the favourite” plays on the soundsystem is in order!

The jury gave a special mention to Baby by Eubha Akilade, a formally ambitious 20-minute short film shot in one continuous take that explores themes of miscarriage, abusive relationships and womanhood. This is the second year on the trot that Akilade has received a special mention; her debut film Black Wool was given the same accolade last year, and went on to win the Scottish Bafta for Best Short. 

The Bill Douglas Award was set to be awarded by a jury consisting of Oana Ghera, Artistic Director of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival; Fransiska Prihadi, Programme Director of Minikino, a non-profit short film organisation from Indonesia; and last year’s Bill Douglas award winner, Iranian underground audiovisual artist Saleh Kashefi. Only two of them made it to Glasgow for the festival, however. The Home Office shamefully denied Kashefi a visa to attend, but the filmmaker made their presence felt remotely with a powerful desktop video they made to help present the award, which went to Kashefi's fellow Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory for her moving-image work Razeh-del. 

Still from Razeh-del, courtesy of Glasgow Short Film Festival

GSFF only showed an extract of Razeh-del at the award ceremony, but its layered use of text, voiceover and fragments from classics of Iranian cinema suggested a rich and timely film concerned with the Iranian regime’s retrograde attitude to women and their representation in the country's media. The jury called Razeh-del “a masterpiece” and “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.”

The jury gave a special mention to Their Eyes by Nicolas Gourault, while festival-goers had a great pick for their International Audience Award: Freak by American filmmaker Claire Barnett. Shot on what looks to be a lo-res digital camera or even a VHS camcorder, Freak sees a young couple, a man and woman, interviewing each other in their Brooklyn apartment, taking turns to ask what the other's deepest, darkest sexual fantasy is. But when the woman, who’s turning 26 at midnight, confesses to having a major adolescent crush on someone many would find inappropriate, her boyfriend has a hilarious meltdown when he feels the answer challenges both his masculinity and his queerness. All of this is presented with the characters taking turns holding the camera and filming each other. It would be wrong to spoil who the crush is, but let’s just say he’s ripped, would be handy at DIY around the house, and you’d never run out of booze with him around. To be honest, I get the attraction.

During the awards ceremony, GSFF itself came in for much praise from several jury members for the sense of community it’s fostering in the Scottish film scene and its commitment to highlighting political injustice around the world, not least the ongoing atrocities in Gaza by inviting a delegation of the Gaza Film Unit – a collective of Palestinian filmmakers who are using cinema to document the genocide and preserve Palestinian narratives – to Glasgow to screen their work. 

Giulio Vita of the Scottish jury highlighted the importance of festivals like GSFF continuing to platform Palestinian filmmakers and keeping the war crimes that are being committed in Gaza and elsewhere by the Israeli government very much at the front of everyone’s minds. “It might not seem it, but it’s a big step up by the festival, especially in a time like this when [other European festivals] are fucking cowards,” says Vita. 

“This has been an incredible edition of the festival, with sell-out screenings, exciting collaborations and guests from every continent," said Matt Lloyd, GSFF's director. He particularly highlighted the strength of this year's Scottish competition, which he called one of the best he can remember. "The Scottish competition jury has chosen a winner and a special mention who both carry so much promise for cinematic narrative fiction filmmaking," he said. "Meanwhile, the international jury has singled out two brilliant films that in different ways address concerns of power and freedom of expression at the individual and global level. Finally, as ever, our audiences here in Glasgow and at HMP Polmont have demonstrated their exquisite taste in selecting two vastly entertaining works to take home the Scottish and International Audience Awards.”

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The next edition of Glasgow Short Film Festival takes place 18-22 March 2026 
glasgowshort.org