A Brief History of Princess X

Director: Jack Jeffreys

Year: 2026

Fish are nightly invaders of my sleep. Work consumes my dreams. Night gives way to another commute; adverts appear before me, their faces drawn tight. The day passes again, and at night, within the walls of my workplace, a fishmonger’s in London, dreams appear again, this time, a grief-stricken reverie, memories of my father. The film's title is inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Book to Come’ which incited my exploration of whether images can capture anything sacred in a world of dispossession. A diaristic, psychogeographic journey through a city that metastasises uncontrollably before me, the film captures a form of alienation that supersedes and confounds the trajectory of grief. What is lost when all becomes gloss? Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

Director: Wallace Minchong Li

Year: 2026

European archival footage from the 1950s documents the life of indigenous, nomadic Sahrawi children and youth in Western Sahara / Morocco. Seventy years later, local young people from Laayoune (El Aaiún) revisit locations that may have appeared in the footage. From ocean to desert to oasis, under trembling starlight, they share their thoughts on life, dreams, and utopia as they search for an uncertain upstream. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

Director: Patrick Hough

Year: 2026

Filmmaker Patrick Hough journeys through the haunted landscapes of Ireland, where colonial violence, ecological loss and queer desire remain inscribed in the land. Moving between forests, mountains, archives and cruising grounds, the film traces the extinction of the Irish grey wolf alongside the cultural suppression that followed Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. Fragments of history surface through objects and places: a death mask of Oliver Cromwell, medieval myths of werewolves, maps drawn to measure and divide conquered territory, and landscapes where wolves were once hunted to disappearance. These materials are interwoven with contemporary nocturnal scenes of queer gathering and protest, where shame gives way to transformation, pleasure and resistance. Blending essay film, documentary and poetic fiction, LANDSCAPES OF SHAME asks how violence survives in landscapes, language and bodies - and what forms of wildness still remain. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026