Because I'm a Girl

Director: Arturs Voblikovs

Year: 2025

A print shop owner with seasonal depression becomes obsessed with copying the life of his new customer, an extravagant jungle explorer, based on his film photographs... Official Selection London Short Film Festival LSFF 2026 Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

Director: Andreea-Loren Florea

Year: 2026

Matei, a young boy living in a village on the outskirts of Romania, finds more solace in the company of his sheep than with his abusive, alcoholic father. When Matei begins to mimic his father's violence and turn it back onto the sheep, we glimpse the anger that may lie in his future. After he publicly humiliates himself in front of the entire village, his anger only grows, made worse by the fact that his father predicted it. It seems Matei is predetermined to be whatever he is told he is, and nothing else. He is stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and humiliation. So, when Matei runs off into the woods outside his village and stares at an innocent little sheep, he finds himself at a crossroads. Official Selection, Aesthetica 2026 Official Selection, BFI London Film Festival 2026 Official Selection, Encounters Film Festival 2026

Director: Tatiana Collet Apraxine

Year: 2028

You awaken on a fog-shrouded shoreline and meet Echo, a strange child with a hole in their stomach. Together you cross a lantern festival where the veil between worlds is thinnest, sail into an ocean that opens beneath you, and descend through a portal into the Underworld. The Underworld moves through different facets of grief: a rave where silhouettes dance in slow motion, indifferent to Echo's attempts to reach them; a frozen sea where giant statues crack open to release a buried memory of a lost mother; a shadow theatre where an anger monster is unleashed, reducing everything to embers. From the embers, a boat carries you into a vast darkness, where Mother appears, and they are finally reunited. You sail together to the Tree of Life, a bioluminescent, cosmic jungle. Echo begs her to return to the World of the Living, but ancestors appear and surround you. She cannot come back - the journey was never about bringing her back. Echo, revealed to be your own child self, dissolves around you as the hole fills with light.