Talking Shorts

There’s no experience quite as self-reflective as a high-speed train journey. The writer Agustina Bessa-Luís thought of trains as a “collective sleeping in transit”, the stillness of one’s body while in perpetual motion allowing for a door to open onto a liminal chronotope, with a distorted sense of space and time. From its stature as the “image of cinema” since the medium’s ...

Zuza Banasińska has the innate ability to translate the tactility of real-world objects into cinematic language. Their 2026 short film Kontrewers is part experimental documentary, part fiction, tied to a Polish folktale. In it, the ghost of a young girl who has been trapped for centuries in the mysterious ‘Kontrewers stone’ is drawn to an older woman, mistaking her for...

Queer history has been built on the foundations of community, on the eagerness to survive outside of the heteronormative norm and the gender binary. Curators achieve an essential labour of memory by keeping a collective remembrance alive and safe from censorship and the threatening passage of time. While researching XPOSED Queer Film Festival Berlin’s stimulating perspective ...

How do we live together? This is the question at the heart of Onyeka Igwe’s practice. To investigate the present, the London-born and based artist-filmmaker looks back at the past and goes into archives, where documents that purport to be truthful accounts of history reside. Yet for Igwe, the encounter with archives offers no clear resolution.

Whose history is fact and...