Glasgow Short Film Festival reveals 2026 programme
The much-loved GSFF returns for its 19th edition with a spotlight on Iranian filmmaker Gelare Khoshgozaran, an archive programme celebrating the Clyde, and the festival’s usual expert curation of shorts from across the world
Glasgow Short Film Festival is back. Scotland’s largest celebration of short film cinema kicks off, as it tends to do sometimes, with a feature film: Víctor Diago’s Downriver a Tiger, which is being presented in collaboration with the Catalan Film Festival and CinemaAttic. Described as a dreamlike portrait of Glasgow, it follows Júlia (played by Júlia Diago, the director’s twin sister), a young photographer from Barcelona who’s moved to Glasgow hoping for a fresh start. The film follows her as she snaps photos around town during the day, and works as a kitchen porter at night, until one day her eyesight starts to fail. We’re told Diago conceived the film as “a fable about migration through a fleeting love story”, and that story is told by "blending fiction and documentary-style filmmaking with archive material paying tribute to the migrants and workers who built post-industrial cities such as Glasgow".
Glasgow’s past is also evoked in Clyde Reflections, a programme of archive shorts inspired by Louise Welsh and Jude Barber’s podcast series Who Owns the Clyde? The programme also includes new short vignettes of the Clyde today by filmmaker Chris Leslie; Welsh, Barber and Leslie will be in conversation after the screening. Adam Lewis Jacob's film You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, Do You?, meanwhile, gives a reflection on the history of Bradford Resource Centre, which had been a key hub for community action in that Yorkshire city since 1979 until a flood in 2024.
This year’s retrospective explores the work of Iranian filmmaker and artist Gelare Khoshgozaran, and takes the form of two retrospective screenings and an on-stage conversation with Khoshgozaran. Intertwining historical archives, personal memories, and dreams, Khoshgozaran’s work engages with legacies of imperial violence manifested in war, militarisation and borders. This retrospective of their work couldn’t feel more urgent, given the deadly unrest in Iran and the daily atrocities being committed by the Regime there.
Elsewhere in the lineup, you’ll find an array of specially curated shorts programmes. Lost in Transmission, curated by Ren Scateni, is described as a four-part strand "concerned with the structuralist conception of language as indeterminate of meaning". Film journal and virtual cinematheque Ultra Dogme guest curates Open the Prison Door to Daylight: Four Films of Refusal, which GSFF describes as “four strikes against the eye of Empire, linking the lineages of Arab and Black revolutionary thought, their critiques of power and their visions of communal emancipation”. Also intriguing is Desires of the Digital Flesh, a programme featuring hybrid and animated works "exploring the ever-closing gap between our bodies and technology". It’s curated by Heather Bradshaw, Balenji Mwiche and Grace Feinmann, and is followed by a party featuring DJs LuckyBabe and Makaya of gullygully.
Plenty of GSFF favourites return too, like comedy programme For Shorts & Giggles, animated Family Shorts and Scared Shortless, the strand beloved by all the horror freaks out there. And as ever, the heart of the festival is its two competitions: the Bill Douglas Award showcasing groundbreaking international works, and the Scottish Short Film Award, which celebrates homegrown short cinema.
“This year’s programme feels particularly timely,” says GSFF’s director Matt Lloyd, “whether examining legacies of Imperial violence through the work of Gelare Khoshgozaran and the curation of Ultra Dogme, or the disconnect between language and objectivity in Ren Scateni’s Lost in Transmission strand, or through the erasure of community and public space as explored in Adam Lewis Jacob’sYou Don’t Know What You Don’t Know, Do You? and Louise Welsh and Jude Barber’s ongoing investigation Who Owns the Clyde?”
Lloyd’s latter point is referencing, among other lost community spaces, the recent devastating closure of the CCA, which has long been the main hub for GSFF’s screenings, events and other activities. “We were looking forward to returning to our oldest partner venue CCA this year,” says Lloyd, “and the loss of that space is devastating for the city. I’d like to pay tribute to the incredible CCA staff with whom we worked for 20 years, and also to thank Civic House and the Grosvenor Picture Theatre for stepping in to house us at short notice.”
The 19th edition of the Glasgow Short Film Festival will run from 18-22 Mar; full programme and tickets at glasgowshort.org