The Boat

Director: David Robinson, Bryan Michael Mills

Year: 2023

A bleak, surreal silent short film that references Beckett’s ‘First Love’ monologue, isolation and ghosts. The film is loosely based on the story of Denis McCabe, a musician and employee of the Castle Caldwell Estate, Belleek and The Fiddler’s Stone - a tombstone made in his memory.

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.

Director: Trim Lamba

Year:

After buying a second-hand iPhone, a man discovers it’s filled with notes and doodles that reveal a disturbing portrait of its former owner. Official Selection London Short Film Festival 2026