Clapham International Film Festival 2025
The festival's 4th edition takes place 13 - 21 September
Estate agents, barber jackets, Australians. It’s safe to say that Clapham’s reputation is one of nouveau refinery rather than cultural transgression. Surrounded as it is by storied haunts of Brixton and Battersea, Clapham’s unique feeling is too often neglected as a film location. Once the setting of social dramas like Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed (1944) and Up The Junction (Peter Collinson, 1968), and the odd, brief cameo in forgotten Renown films and The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967), the area’s constituent cinematic lineage is a bric-a-brac befitting of the area’s townhouses, winding footpaths, and modern estates.
Now in its fourth year, the Clapham International Film Festival promises to amend this.
Alongside a mandate to celebrate emerging talent through an awards ceremony, the programme pleasingly features a heavy raft of local filmmakers. It takes place at inviting historical venues such as The RBL and Omnibus Theatre, the latter of which will host a day-long shorts programme. We have put together a humble guide to the festival’s highlights, alongside some recommendations from the programmers. It might be too much to ask for this to become London’s answer to Tribeca, but for now we’re excited about the possibilities of what this festival can bring to South London’s film calendar. Words by Ben Flanagan, Blaise Radley, and Esmé Holden.
Reveries: The Mind Prison Wednesday 17th, - Royal British Legion, 7:30
The kind of late night movie that you find at the bottom of a bong rip. Following director Graham Mason’s short film Reveries (2018), and slightly-longer film Reveries: Going Deeper (2020), Reveries: The Mind Prison continues the picaresque and unconnected journeys of two drifters (Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck, who also wrote the film) as they imbibe what they can, and share paranoid stories about the far reaches of reality.
If you can’t get enough of Connor O’Malley’s visions, Reveries could be your obsession. Kaleidoscopic images, vampiric pontifications, a twinkling, synth-heavy mock-80s soundtrack. Vivid Kodak landscapes have an air of Zabriskie to them, always undercut by a slightly askew pout or gesture. This film has a great sense of timing, always upending scenes just before they become predictable, or dropping a self-aware aside whenever it seems like it’s crawling too far up itself. This is some real heavy shit, man. BF
Unthinkable Thursday 18 - The Landor Space, Doors 19.30
Northern promise shines through as upstart arts festival Unthinkable descends on the good folk of Clapham to show us what's really going on and tell it like it is. A curated collection of short films highlighting the abundance of talent that is lurking just a few minutes up the M1. This programme features Out of the Peat, co-directed by Cinema Year Zero past contributor Theo Rollason and Tabitha Carless-Frost. It’s an exquisitely composed folk-horror about an amateur archaeologist’s attempts to exhume a bog body in Lancashire.
Programmer's Choice: Benches. The singular Philip Codd gives us a guided tour of Hull's bench scene.
Funny Ha Ha Friday 19 - The Landor Space, Doors 19.30
From cradle to grave, a sense of humour develops over a lifetime, from the guttural recesses of a fart joke, to the sophisticate’s route: attempting to comprehend Japanese ramen relationship dramas. This programme has it all, with breakneck short films designed to tickle even the most ardent frownland inhabitant, before transcending into the higher planes of cinematic wackiness for a hearty dose of spicy content.
Programmer's Choice: Yellow MashiMashi Rhapsody (Beta). Competitive ramen eating just got personal.
Love, war, and ramen are close bedfellows in Yellow MashiMashi Rhapsody, a noisy, full-throttle comedy that follows a mild-mannered wife guy’s descent into a duelling Jiro-style ramen cult known as the Jirorians. Director, writer, editor (and ramen-maker) Masahiro Saito comes out the gate swinging, serving up a perverse mish-mash of blown-out soap opera lighting, cutaways to nature documentary fornication, and strobing Japanese kanji. Even the English subtitles are expressive; never just “Hello” but “Heyyyy”; or the hypnotic all caps “PORK PORK PORK PORK” mantra that scores the film’s nightmarish ramen battle sequences. All a day in the life of a devout Jirorian. BR
French Toast Sunday 21 - Royal British Legion, Doors 11:30
Clapham is about as far as you can get from the Croisette, but it has a surprisingly strong French contingent. This short film programme gives a broad overview of the country’s short film scene, with documentary, romance, and slow cinema joined arm in arm.
Our pic is Cyclops (2025, Oriane Picant). Through the soft haze of super 16mm film, the light density of a forest seems hazy and distant. But first-time director Picant points us to somewhere even further back than this nostalgic technology first suggests, to the time of Homer. Quoting from the Odyssey, two friends in the modern day, or something like it, have “reached the land of the Cyclops.”
These compatriots aren’t quite estranged but are heading that way. Soon enough, overeager bro-hugs descend into awkwardness and half-formed resentments. They see the names of couples carved into trees and can’t help but wonder if any of them are still together; everything feels fragile in a place like this. Nature is both material and dreamlike here, in images that don’t stretch for pictorialism but allow it to emerge.
Likewise, eyes seem to emerge all over: in small pools of water, pulled out roots and the wounds of trees. But when nature looks back at the boys, what does it see? Its gaze isn’t exactly cold, nor is it comforting. It lies somewhere more elusive, some place they will have long left the forest, and perhaps each other's lives, before they’ll start to understand. EH