Documentary Short Film Competition 1

The first of two competition programmes for documentary short films at LIFF, offering an expansive view of what documentaries can be.   As self-driving cars learn to navigate the Global North, their teachers - low-paid clickworkers in the Global South - learn to navigate a system that’s exploiting them. A colourful look at the invisible work that is shaping how machines read our world.Yorkshire Premiere | Nicolas Gourault | France | 2025 | 23 mins | English, Spanish In this short, sharp scream of a film, the social and ecological consequences of the Congolese cobalt industry’s violent labour practices are uneasily allied with the mining of images for use by generative AI.UK Premiere | Francois Knoetze, Amy Louise Wilson | South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo | 2024 | 7 mins | English In a climate-ravaged future, scientists study archive films to reimagine fruit growers’ bond with the land. As the footage hums with life, this inventive doc-fiction draws speculative links between the creativity of cultivation and the emotive power of cinema.UK Premiere | Gregor Božič | Slovenia, UK | 2025 | 15 mins | Slovenian, English, French, Italian Plants that devour women. Fevers of unknown origin. An ocean that can teach you how to vanish. Fragments of a forbidden love story bloom in the shade of an oppressive regime in this poetic, experimental essay whose roots stretch far beneath the surface.Yorkshire Premiere | Maryam Tafakory | UK, France | 2025 | 16 mins | Farsi Cairo, January 2007. Abdellah searches for his lost love, Omar. Legendary filmmaker Youssef Chahine completes his final film. The city streets pulse with romance, animated by the mystery and intimacy of love and cinema.UK Premiere | Abdellah Taïa | France | 2025 | 19 mins | Arabic Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che, refugees from the Vietnam War, reflect on the real war and the fake one: Apocalypse Now, where they appear as extras. What is reality when media shapes perception, making some people fully human and others part of the landscape?Christopher Radcliff | USA, Canada | 2025 | 15 mins | Vietnamese