Local characters, fake ads, and a woman with a bag on her head – Walthamstow International Film Festival 2026

At the weekend I spent a couple of hours at the lovely Walthamstow Trades Hall for the 17th Walthamstow International Film Festival, which was showing some 80-odd short movies over the course of a few hours.

One of the things I really like as I’ve grown older is seeing people enter a field and start thriving. One of the things that the festival does is give an audience to student film projects, and also open up the stage to allow them to introduce their films. The likes of Xaymaca Awoyungbo came across as super-confident introducing their work on a day that took in animations, student projects, documentaries and experimental work.

On the animation side I enjoyed Jamie Harry Scrutton’s Phantasmajoric, which featured Salvador Dalí and Marilyn Monroe among others emerging on a canvas before a bemused artist, while Humanity in Dark Times by Aliaksei Rodzik was a suitably dark and smudged animation about conflict and war.

[Picture caption: A still from Humanity in Dark Times by Aliaksei Rodzik]

Another war-based film was In Illo Tempore by Romania’s Alfred Schupler. Visually it was incredibly evocative, documenting a project that superimposed photos found in the wreckage of broken Ukrainian buildings with images of the sites of the Russian strikes. However, it was accompanied by a curiously unemotive voiceover that felt like ChatGPT platitudes rather than really delving into the stories and locations of the images.

[Picture caption: A display of the In Illo Tempore project by Alfred Schupler]

We caught a couple of fake adverts, one for Otterly Pure – the chance to become an otter, which had been created by Michael Taylor to send as part of an “am I being ghosted?” revenge txt exchange – and a bizarre promo for Tommy’s Tuck Inn by Fletch Fletcher, which also included Keir Starmer and King Charles III imploring Wetherspoons to open in Walthamstow for some reason.

One of the intros mentioned that Peadair Duggan had originally been intending to make a documentary about “an emo friend training to be a priest”. They said the film they ended up with – about a teenager called Harri who lives with cerebral palsy – was superior. But I still desperately want to see “an emo friend training to be a priest”.

There were a couple of features that had their focus on what we might term “local characters”—both of whom I know. My Golden Body (It’s 50) by John Renney saw Paul Stone deliver his deadpan poetry about being gay on the cusp of your 50s, while The Eye was about Seán Sexton, a local collector of vintage and antique photography. He has had a documentary about him made by RTÉ in his native Ireland, but what I liked about Aleks Golis’s film were the brief interviews by fellow collectors going “Oh yeah, Seán is always there” like an absolute stalwart of the scene. I used to know a lot of people like that in my record-fair dealer days.

If I was going to make one niggly gripe it was that I did find the programming a little lopsided. It seemed to have been done by playing films in the alphabetical order of their titles, rather than grouping them by theme or programming them by style. So there was a lucky-dip feel, but it also meant there were some awkward handbrake turns between something really deep and professionally produced and a student project that maybe didn’t shine by comparison.

Charlotte Bracegirdle took the top prize, and appropriately enough introduced My Paper Bag Life while wearing the titular device that gave the piece its charm. Liza and Fletch Fletcher have been running the event since 2010 – I previously went to the 2024 edition – but have announced they are “passing the baton” and looking forward to “handing over the festival to a new generation of film curators, programmers, and screen exhibition organisers”. It is an event I hope to continue to visit and support for many years to come.

[Picture caption: Charlotte Bracegirdle being interviewed by Liza]