At our annual Awards Ceremony yesterday at Curzon Soho, LSFF announced the winners of its Official Competition at the festival’s 23rd edition, which took place 23 January - 1 February 2026 across venues throughout London, with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.
Selected by this year’s Competition Jury - filmmaker and Others Cinemas co-founder Arwa Aburawa, actor and 2026 BAFTA EE Rising Star nominee Posy Sterling and Festival Director of Queer East Yi Wang - the award-winning films reflect the formal ambition, thematic urgency and individual voices that are central to LSFF’s curatorial identity. The UK award is supported by the British Council.
UK COMPETITION
WINNER - Flint (Dir. Naqqash Khalid, UK, 2025)
This film was incredibly confident filmmaking, strong performances, creative collaboration and skillful cohesion of all the elements of filmmaking to serve the vision, from colour grading, costume, sound and performance. It’s really a testament to a great director. It ticks all the boxes, and it’s filmmaking guided by emotion.
RUNNER-UP - Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside (Dir. Rhea Storr, UK, 2025)
A beautiful, sensitive and original exploration of displacement right here in the city of London. It asks difficult questions about gentrification, memory, archive, without offering any neat solutions or answers. The film asks you to sit in that in-between, liminal space which the displaced must make home.
INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
WINNER - Abortion Party (Dir. Julia Mellen, Spain, 2025)
This film was super original, and it’s a humorous approach to an important topic. It’s claiming back what it means to be a woman; it’s surprising, funny, and also topical insight into the suppression of women’s rights and the ways that we fight back. It’s an incredibly original filmmaking vision.
RUNNER-UP - Crazy for You (Dir. Greta Díaz Moreau, Spain, 2025)
The jury feels that the film beautifully captures the tension, confusion and excitement of growing up and falling in love, with a superb performance from the lead actress. A coming-of-age drama with a powerful twist that offers an honest societal critique of the harm of masculinity and makes a bold statement on women’s empowerment.
This year’s competition winners highlighted the breadth and boldness of contemporary short filmmaking, from intimate personal reckoning to politically charged and formally inventive storytelling. The selected films stood out for their clarity of vision and emotional impact, reflecting the risk-taking spirit at the heart of the London Short Film Festival. International Competition winner Abortion Party further marks a returning success for director Julia Mellen, who previously won the award in 2020, underscoring LSFF’s ongoing relationship with filmmakers whose work continues to evolve and resonate.
Philip Ilson, Artistic Director, said, “Our competition filmmakers are the heart of LSFF. The winning works this year stood out for their clarity of vision, emotional force and inventive approach to storytelling. It’s a privilege to celebrate filmmakers whose work challenges and excites audiences in equal measure.”
Aleks Dimitrijevic, Festival Director, said, “These winning films represent the breadth and ambition of short filmmaking today. Each brings a distinct formal language and perspective, and together they reflect the bold, risk-taking spirit that LSFF is proud to champion.”
The Low Budget Award was judged by London College of Communication BA Film and Screen Studies Students, and announced during the ceremony by Maja Kaniewska. and won by Crude Poetry, directed by Mara Frampton. I Want To Know What Love Is, directed by Hanna Järgenstedt, received the Special Mention. Lo-Budget Mayhem is a popular annual programme celebrating inventive, DIY, and micro-budget short films that embrace unconventional, hand-crafted approaches to filmmaking.
The awards were presented during the festival’s closing event in Curzon Soho, marking the culmination of ten days of screenings, special events and Q&As. The festival includes five days of Industry events for filmmakers and creatives.
The 2026 edition of the London Short Film Festival marked one of the festival’s most expansive and dynamic programmes to date, presenting 300 works spanning new voices, acclaimed directors and underground discoveries drawn from the archive. Reflecting the full emotional range of short-form cinema, the line-up moved from raw DIY confessionals to bold cinematic storytelling - films that surprised, unsettled, comforted and lingered long after the screen went dark. Anchored by the thematic thread Cinema Remembers What We Forget, this year’s festival explored how artists grapple with memory and identity, bringing to the surface the messy, emotional, defiant and unfiltered fragments that shape personal and collective histories.