Tomorrow night (6 January) sees the annual London Short Film Festival (LSFF) celebrate its 9th incarnation with a special opening night part at the ICA. Taking place throughout 24 different venues across the capital over the course of 11 days, this year’s festival boasts around 70 various events – each showcasing a variety of cutting-edge, home-grown independent films. A must for any fan of inventive and forward thinking cinema, the London Short Film Festival is renowned for putting on a mixture of audacious cross-arts events and giving a platform for talented UK filmmakers to present their unique work to an open-minded audience of both film-lovers, filmmakers and UK industry professionals.
One of the most exciting prospects of this year’s eclectic programme looks to be the festival’s collaboration with Midnight Movies. This section of the festivals diverse line-up contains 11 short films and takes place at Dalston’s Rio Cinema. Featuring a mixture of mind-bending movies which claim to combine late-night surrealist nightmares with good old fashion horror techniques, this midnight extravaganza of chills and frights is certainly an attraction – especially as it includes one of the festival’s highlights – Warp Films’ The Organ Grinder’s Monkey (2011), which stars Rhys Ifans. Venues for this year’s event include numerous of the city’s best-loved cinemas including the BFI Southbank and ICA.
The London Short Film Festival 2012 takes place from 6-15 January. For more info and to book tickets, visit shortfilms.org.uk.