Directors Notes
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Directors NotesUKFrom Cosmic Head Explosions to Awkward Third Wheels: 11 Short Films to Discover at Encounters Film Festival 2026 While much of the film industry’s attention will soon turn towards the BFI London Film Festival , for those of us more deeply embedded in the short film world, it’s festivals like Encounters that…
Directors NotesUKLola-Rose Maxwell Turns a Vintage Coat Into a Voyeuristic Menace in Her Debut Horror Comedy ‘Attack of the Coat’ As children, many of us harboured the fear that the objects in our homes were actually alive and that during the night they would suddenly wake up and attack us, fulfilling our worst nightmares.
Directors NotesUKWhen Friendship Becomes a Nightmare: Hugo De Sousa on His SXSW Short ‘Best Friends with the Devil’ Relationships have long been fertile ground for storytellers, but while romantic entanglements dominate so many narratives, stories centred on friendship are comparatively rare.
Directors NotesUKPolitical, Powerful and Playful: 10 Captivating Shorts from Bolton International Film Festival 2026 A perennial highlight of the film festival calendar for us, Directors Notes has the pleasure once again to bring you our personal favourite selection of films screening at the mighty Bolton…
Directors NotesUK‘Fjallferð’ Finds Song, Storm and Community Strength in the Mountains of Iceland’s Annual Sheep Round-Up If you love enchanting landscapes and the beauty of nature, as well as the risks that come with it, from sudden snowstorms and heavy downpours to extreme heat, you’ll definitely love Fjallferð .
Directors NotesUKTheo Matza Zooms in on Digital Deception and Tourist Naivety in His Paris-Set Catfishing Comedy ‘Faux Amis’ Forget the Paris of dreams, stereotypes, joy, and happiness that you usually see in films. This one doesn’t give anyone a free pass.
Directors NotesUKThe Seven Year Intergalactic Journey of Shahaf Ram and His Independent Animated Space Opera ‘Orange Story’ When we talk about independent filmmaking, we usually mean a filmmaker working outside the structures and expectations of the studio system.
Directors NotesUKJasper Martin Finds Comedy in the Sisyphean Horror of AI Customer Service in ‘Listen Then Repeat’ Having recently encountered the frustration of AI customer service, it’s easy to understand why satisfaction with this form of ‘support’ is reportedly at its lowest level in a decade.
Directors NotesUKAndy Reid Calibrates the Cost of Making Something Honest in His Meta SXSW Short ‘Brief Somebodies’ Filmmaking has long provided artists with a means of processing difficult experiences. When the subject is deeply personal, however, the process of transforming these lived experiences into a…
Directors NotesUKAnna Hopkins Cooks Up Connection After Closing Time in Restaurant Set Two-Hander ‘Dish Pit’ A restaurant is usually portrayed on screen as a place of chaos: shouted orders, sizzling dishes, hurried footsteps and plates moving from kitchen to table in a seemingly endless rush.
Directors NotesUKNatural Selection Comes to Homeroom as Kyle Sims Pits Teacher Against Student in His Wordless Thriller ‘Galapagos’ Dialogue is often seen as one of cinema’s most fundamental tools for developing character, establishing relationships and guiding an audience through a story.
Directors NotesUKJacque Rabie Sets Aside Judgement to Find the Man Inside Japan’s Museum of Sex Dolls in ‘Hyodo’s Paradise’ There’s an obvious visual appeal and heightened intrigue to a documentary about a man who lives in a museum of sex dolls.
Directors NotesUK10 Unforgettable Short Films DN Spotted at Sarajevo Film Festival 2026 Like every August, the Sarajevo Film Festival returns as the largest and most important film festival in the Balkans.
Directors NotesUKTwo Sisters Fracture Under a Collapsing World in Leandros Braounos & Daniel Howells’ Afrikaans Short ‘Winter Slaap’ True world-building can be such a tricky thing to master in a short film. By definition, the budgets are not always there to physically create it, nor is the available runtime sufficient to fully…
Directors NotesUKFilmmakers of the Future: 10 Essential Shorts from the Locarno Film Festival As every year, in the very middle of August, the Locarno Film Festival comes back, bringing one of the most revolutionary selections of films and allowing audiences to discover some of the most…
Directors NotesUKLi Anne Liew’s Gentle Ghost Drifts Through Strangers’ Secret Selves in ‘glide (all the people i’ll never be)’ Ghost stories usually run on threat — the cold spot, the thing that shouldn’t be there, the dread of being watched.
Directors NotesUKDefiant Black Trans Sisterhood Crashes Upscale Gentrification in Nana Duffuor’s Heist Short ‘Rainbow Girls’ Inspired by the real-life Rainbow Girls—the name the media gave a loosely connected group of young women who staged a string of brazen thefts across San Francisco’s Union Square in the early 2010s…
Directors NotesUKNathan Xia Interrogates Hollywood Representation and Personal Ego in Satirical Short ‘Flavor of the Month’ Conducting interviews for Directors Notes, it’s easy to fall into the rhythm of asking the same questions over and over again.
Directors NotesUKHow Jasper Caverly’s ‘Pleasure’ Challenges Masculinity and Queerness Through Australia’s Eshay Subculture. Growing up in the 1980s in a particularly rough part of the UK, where even something as simple as a boy having long hair could invite ridicule, it often felt like a suffocating time to explore…
Directors NotesUKKelly Sarri Turns a Punishing Summer Into Intimate, Generational Warfare in Her Scorching Climate Short ‘Heat Me’ Somewhere north of Athens, right now, the hills are burning. As Heat Me reaches Directors Notes, Attica is living the film’s premise in real time — evacuations, blackouts, a sky the colour of ash…
Directors NotesUKLianpeng Zhao Draws on Chinese Myth for a Soul’s Last Journey in ‘Museum of Death’ A soul retraces the fragments of a life once lived, wandering through a museum where discarded, weathered objects stand as manifestations of everything that has been left behind.
Directors NotesUKDavid Huang & Albie Smith-Chang on Blurring Reality and Fiction in iPhone Short Film ‘WE BUY GOLD’ With Directors Notes dedicated to independent cinema, it’s often not the slickest productions that capture our attention, but the films that feel genuinely fresh, distinctive and alive.
Directors NotesUKGuilherme Proença Crafts a Liminal Performance Testing Ground in Fashion Film ‘Human Trials’ Set inside a Copenhagen archival shop, Human Trials builds a liminal space where three figures are put through a series of quietly strange tests, each one governed by a watchful presence counting…
Directors NotesUKHow Being an “Extreme Daydreamer” Inspires the Work of Sacha Beeley and Her Short Film ‘Babyface’ Surreal, abstract, experimental – however you choose to describe the animation of Sacha Beeley , one thing is undeniable: they’re a unique voice.
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