Cinema Remembers What We Forget. Read our programme announcement as the full lineup for LSFF2026 drops.
300 works from new voices, acclaimed directors, and underground discoveries drawn from the archive - the full LSFF 2026 programme has dropped.
This year's line-up spans the full emotional range of short-form cinema. From raw DIY confessionals to bold, cinematic stories, these are films that surprise, unsettle, comfort, and stay with you.
Cinema Remembers What We Forget, the underlying current in this year’s programme, explores how artists confront memory and identity - the fragments that linger beneath the surface: the messy, the emotional, the defiant and the unfiltered.
Supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.
We're at cinemas and venues across London, 23 January - 1 February. Explore the full programme and book tickets now.
Keep reading to find out some selected highlights.
New Shorts
Comedian Joe Lycett brings laughs with Dating Mark Silcox as part of LSFF’s annual comedy showcase Funny Shit sponsored by Beroud Consulting. Michael Spicer (The Room Next Door) stars in - and directs - Parminder Nagra (Bend it Like Beckham) in Closedown, while Alice Lowe (Sightseers) longs for the nostalgic tradition of marriage in For Better; both films screen in Looking Through The Square Window. British artist-filmmaker and fellow LSFF alumnus Andrew Kötting (Gallivant) directs Hope Holds Up Her Head and Hopes.
In Competition
In the UK Competition, sponsored by British Council, Screen Star of Tomorrow Naqqash Khalid builds on the success of his debut feature In Camera with FLINT, in which a man revisits his childhood home in search of healing, starring Rory Fleck Byrne (This Is Going to Hurt) and BAFTA-winner Mark Jenkin (Bait, Enys Men) returns to the festival with I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash. Two past Best International Short winners are back at the festival: Julia Mellen returns with Abortion Party, six years after her 2020 win, and Dorien Jespers - who took the award in 2021 - competes this year with Loynes.
Special Events
Curated special events, with a focus on personal filmmaking, DIY aesthetics, and reclaimed narratives, take place in venues across the city. The festival opens at Curzon Soho with This Time It’s Personal where directors, including John Smith and Andrea Luka Zimmerman, turn the camera inward to narrate their past through personal diaries, home videos, early social media posts, and archival documentation. Showing as part of the BFI’s Too Much: Melodrama on Film season, Everybody’s Darling: Melodrama in 80s & 90s Punk Cinema is a collection of shorts from the underground where glamour, obsession, and melodrama take centre stage. Event supported by Film Hub London, managed by Film London. Proud to be a partner of the BFI Film Audience Network, funded by the National Lottery.
A CoreCore Mixtape, presented by Immaterial Film Club and sponsored by CapCut, dives into the viral internet-born CoreCore aesthetic, tracing how DIY TikToks evolved into a form of digital self-expression and emotional collage. Emo Tapes captures the fun, freedom, and creativity of the emo subculture, combining shorts on fashion and music with a short symposium on My Chemical Romance and a spoken word performance. Trans Sister Seventies! - curated by Jaye Hudson from TGirlsOnFilm - uncovers revolutionary trans-feminine stories from newly unearthed archival films of the 1970s that were fierce, fabulous, and defiantly ahead of their time.
Mascara Film Club presents a compelling programme of artists’ films that explore how language, communication, and meaning circulate around disability, deafness, and chronic illness. The team behind Thawra Archive, a living archive navigating, exploring and imagining political education and expression through art, film and cultural production - contributes a series of narratives interrogating myths of a finished decolonisation and emphasising the notion of a Colonial Present. Author, film scholar and curator Misha Zakharov facilitates a gathering on colonialism in Central Asia, featuring experimental shorts that stand in for the four natural elements - earth, water, fire and air - and a panel discussion.
Curator Gamze Şanlı introduces Wildest Grief, a poignant collection of experimental films reflecting on grief and ritual, followed by a dedicated space for collective mourning. Curator Najrin Islam and Four Corners present Tales of Coming, focusing on Bangladeshi land, heritage, and community. Meanwhile, Palestine Looks Back - curated by Theo Panagopoulos - amplifies Palestinian perspectives as filmmakers turn their gaze toward the West.
Emerging documentary filmmakers shortlisted for The Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2026 in Film present and discuss their work in an in-conversation event with Lindsay Poulton, Editorial Director of Film & TV and Head of Documentaries at The Guardian; the prize-winner will selected by Poulton, award-winning documentarian Asif Kapadia and Chief Film Critic at the Financial Times, Danny Leigh. Additionally, students from the London College of Communication curate three special programmes that round out the festival’s diverse and resonant offerings.
LSFF 2026: Bringing new ideas, stories and perspectives
The festival returns to cinemas citywide, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Curzon Soho, BFI Southbank, The Garden Cinema, Rio Cinema, Rich Mix, The Lexi Cinema, and new for this year Kiln Theatre and Cinema, and Riverside Studios.
It also expands into a range of creative and community spaces, such as the world class animation studio Blinkink in Islington, the arts space Metroland Cultures in Kilburn, Toynbee Hall in the East End, Newington Green Meeting House, Good Shepherd Studios in Leytonstone, the Zoroastrian Centre in Harrow, Nunhead Community Cinema and Social Cinema Bromley. All outer borough activity is supported by the BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.
Philip Ilson, Artistic Director, said, “Each year LSFF gives space to the filmmakers who challenge how we see the world, and this edition feels special. Cinema Remembers What We Forget speaks to the power of short film to hold memory, identity and experience in ways that are intimate, urgent and impossible to ignore. We’re proud to present a programme that honours both emerging voices and long-time LSFF alumni, all pushing the form in bold and imaginative directions.”
Aleks Dimitrijevic, Festival Director, said, “LSFF exists to bring new ideas, stories and perspectives to audiences across London, and this year we are taking that even further. By partnering with local cultural spaces and community venues, we aim to introduce new audiences to bold voices and fresh work that reflects the energy, breadth and diversity of the city. We’re proud to curate programmes that speak directly to London’s many communities and offer people the chance to see their own stories reflected on screen, and this year’s edition does exactly that.”