London Short Film Festival: Express Yourself

This January we are bringing part of the London Short Film Festival (LSFF) to Sydenham. Now in its 23rd edition, LSFF runs from 23 January to 1 February 2026, presenting short films and events across London’s iconic cinemas and community organisations. Sydenham Arts Film is hosting a dedicated LSFF event on 29 January, welcoming the festival to Sydenham for one night only.

LSFF presents the best in independent, boundary-pushing filmmaking from around the world, spaning the full emotional range of short-form cinema. From raw DIY confessionals to bold, cinematic stories, these are films that surprise, unsettle, comfort, and stay with you.

Cinema Remembers What We Forget, the underlying current in this year’s Festival, explores how artists confront memory and identity - the fragments that linger beneath the surface: the messy, the emotional, the defiant and the unfiltered.

Express Yourself, the 6 films programme we will be hosting, a day before its official presentation at the ICA, was curated by Philip Ilson and offers a glimpse into the minds and methods of artists at work, tracing, sometimes quite intimately, the creative process.

Art takes many forms here: from the visceral energy of extreme metal at Hellfest to the ethereal resonance of the theremin, and a sharp examination of art school dogma.

And while two artists no longer with us continue to inspire - the veteran, Oscar-winning animator Bob Godfrey, and the young street artist Bilal Berreni, (whose spirit endures in The Girl Looking For The Cabin), LSFF alumnus Mark Jenkin (Enys Men) reflects on creativity, travel, and the restless evolution of the filmmaking life.

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