Aella

Director: Vasilisa Forbes

Year: 2023

An experimental short about female desire, shame and betrayal. Drawing from a highly personal experience we follow a vulnerable young woman experiencing a breakdown via a collision of conflicting relationships and gender power struggles. Using physicality, haunting sound design and immersive camera work as vessels for intimate, multi-layered and unerringly contemporary story telling. Our lead finds herself on a repeating loop, the end is the start as she oscillates between what was and what is. Is she unable to escape her trauma and her psychological suffocation or patterning? The movement echoes the work of Pina Bausch, and in doing so draws links to the expression of the feminist landscape of emotion and conflict that we continue to work through.

Director: Vasilisa Forbes

Year: 2021

DELPHYNE (meaning ‘womb’) discusses the stigma around menstruation. Addressing shame and acceptance, taboos around menstrual blood are told through a fabric-themed metaphor, and the conflict between a mother-daughter relationship. The script is stylised in a theatrical form, taking the works of Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as a background and filmed in rural Suffolk. The tone draws on Petrushevskaya’s depictions of intense female-driven, claustrophobic family relationships particularly between generations of women who pull at each other in close quarters. Both a folk and fairy-tale element exists to the progress of the film, relating to the directors own heritage. The film is shot in East Anglia, Suffolk.

Director: Joe Richardson

Year: 2024

Immortal John is dying. As his last surviving heir, you have been summoned to hear his dying wish. Will he ask you to avenge his death!? To murder all those who have wronged him!!? To bring to fruition his life long plan to topple the ruling elite from within, shattering the balance of power, and ultimately saving the world!!!? Or will he simply ask you to stop being such a shit? Only time will tell. Or me, I can tell you – It's the last one. DEATH OF THE REPROBATE is a gentle story about helping people and being a nice lad. Travel around a quiet, rural town - help the locals in their day to day tasks. Wander into the nearby woods - make idle chit-chit with a woman submerged neck-deep in a tiny pond. Climb to an idyllic viewpoint in the mountains, overlooking earth and sea and sky, the natural and the man-made, the eternal mystery held within the infinite depths of the distant horizon - help a man shoot some birds. This is a game full of slow burning simple pleasures... ...Until the Devil gets involved. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Games Lounge at LFF Expanded