Beginning with its first iteration in 1995, the Belfast Film Festival (BFF) has quickly become one of the country’s most interesting celebrations of filmmaking.
Committed to the experience of cinema, BFF boasts site-specific screenings of classic silver-screen films alongside the many new films it hosts the premiere for.
The festival also sets itself apart through its Irish short film competition, giving filmmakers from across the country the opportunity to showcase their work.
We’ve rounded up five of the most exciting Irish short films to look out for, which are all showing at BFF this November.
Snuff
Written and directed by Louise Nesbitt, Snuff stars Derry Girls’ Saoirse-Monica Jackson. The film follows a woman having an affair who returns home to find her wife, played by Jackson, making a snuff film in their living room. Hilariously, Jackson has her subject tied up in a chair and completely clad in leather, hinting at the short film’s darkly comic undertones. Through Snuff, Nesbitt questions what happens to an unconventional relationship when it is brought to its extremes through characteristically bawdy wit.
Empty Little People
Following their success at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021 – where their short film, Fall of the Ibis King, featured in the Orizzonti competition – animators Josh O’Caoimh and Mikai Geronimo have come together again to collaborate on the dark fairy tale, Empty Little People. With a melancholic and eerie colour palette, and nightmarish animated visions, the film follows the eponymous group of “empty little people” with an insatiable thirst for tea who “begin running out of tea, on All Hallows’ Eve”.
Shea and Hannah
Starring Nathan Quinn-O’Rawe and Erin Coghlan, Shea and Hannah is the directorial debut of up-and-coming Irish filmmaker Dean Conway. With ambitious production design by Lloyd Edgar, and funding from 21 Artists for the 21st Century programme, this short film is not one to miss. Featuring a hungover conversation between two young people, lying in bed the morning after a night out and a one-night stand. Reflecting on life and relationships, the short film offers a candid account of the awkward and endearing sex of the 21st century.
Safe as Houses
Funded by Screen Ireland and directed by award-winning director of Cumasc and Mother & Baby, Mia Mullarkey, Safe as Houses follows Aggie, a woman with Down syndrome living alone in a council estate. Offering shelter to Lucy, a young woman escaping difficult circumstances, their situation together quickly intensifies due to Aggie’s increased susceptibility to her neighbours’ prying eyes. Safe as Homes provides audiences with a heartwarming short film, complemented by its lively score and nuanced cinematography.
Homebird
Starring James Doran as an emotionally distant father who tries to reconnect with his estranged gay son, played by Peter Young, Homebird is set during a night at the seafront amusements of the Northern Irish coast. The tension between them arises from the father’s inability to communicate his sense of abandonment by his son, combined with his son’s guilt from dropping out of university in England. Presenting audiences with a heartwarming yet complex LGBTQ+ narrative, Homebird explores what happens when an estranged family reconnects.
The 22nd Belfast Film Festival runs November 3rd–12th.
