Samizdat 2025 Short Film Competition, Block 2

UK premieres

Wheelchair accessible | English subtitles | Pay-what-you-can tickets (£2–12)

If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our .

Following last year’s Audience Award for Alex Milic’s Consul of Nowhereland (Montenegro), this year’s competition brings 14 new titles — from Poland and Iran to Uzbekistan and Greece. Once again, you — our audience! — will vote for the winner.

Opening with an archival work that exposes the colonial mechanisms and Oriental optics of Soviet filmmaking in Central Asia, our second block moves through the striking, poetic landscapes of Qazaqstan and Georgia, before arriving at a pink bathroom in Ukraine, a surrealist shrimp farm. Diminishing and Orientalising voices and looks from the 1920s–1930s Soviet archive reappear only to be deconstructed in a reflective video essay. Slapstick absurdism from Iran offers a moment of comic relief before a deep over-the-shoulder dive into the lives of children of labour migrants, forced to grow up too quickly.

Content notes: colonialism, extractivism, state oppression, trauma and grief, death and discussion of death, animal cruelty

Access notes: black and white footage, archival footage of varying quality, flashing and flickering lights, loud music

---

Whose Voice Is This? by Dana Iskakova, Qazaqstan*/Uzbekistan/Germany, 2024

Aldi by Giorgi Arabuli, Georgia, 2024

The Experiment by Maxim Akbarov, Qazaqstan*, 2024

Shrimp, Switch, Cigarette Butt and a Little Bottle by Olha Pyrozhyk, Ukraine, 2025

Shreds of Violence, Threads of Repair by Assiya Issemberdieva, Qazaqstan*/UK

Mr. Meftah by Soheil Darvishparvar, Iran, 2024

Mirtemir Is Alright by Sasha Kulak & Michael Borodin, Uzbekistan, 2024

Host or Publisher Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival