International Documentary Short Film Competition 1

Forgotten Spaceman

The history of a nation is family history writ large in this inventive desktop doc, the impersonality of the archive - events seen as if from space - here a backdrop to one man’s perspective on the half-remembered dream of Afghanistan’s first and only astronaut. Yorkshire Premiere | Elham Ehsas | Afghanistan, UK | 2026 | 16 mins | Pashto (Pushto)

Statues Also Die?

In a Budapest park full of decaying monuments to its nation’s bygone communist era, four children gather the opinions of locals, tourists and even the statues themselves as they attempt to understand the complicated future of their past. UK Premiere | Thais Fernandes | Belgium, Brazil, Hungary, Portugal | 2025 | 12 mins | English, Hungarian

Spectral Geography

A river buried, a landscape transformed, the dead commemorated through song. Along Colombia’s Cauca River, women embroider and cast flowers into the water in this haunting meditation on memory, resistance and the enduring violence of extraction. English Premiere | Manuel Mateo | Colombia | 2026 | 22 mins | Spanish

Chuuraa

Deep in the Siberian Arctic, Indigenous Sakha palaeontologist Aisen Klimovskii descends into the thawing permafrost in search of an ancient creature. A mesmerising journey into a prehistoric underworld where science and mythology converge. UK Premiere | Evgenia Arbugaeva | UK | 2026 | 18 mins | English

like moths to light

Prowling nocturnal animals, burning theme parks, doomed prophets… A speculative, docufictional essay that’s as much a rigorous analysis of the new frontier of ‘neurocapitalism’ as it is a poetic reminder of the hallucinatory beauty of our shared human dream. UK Premiere | Gala Hernández López | France, Italy, Spain | 2026 | 26 mins | English

Content Guidance: Contains archival images of armed conflict, and themes of violence and displacement.