Slow Film Festival

The Slow Film Festival annually presents a peculiar and anomalous programme of experimental film relating to, but as often deviating from, durational and landscape moving image art.

The Slow Short Film Festival celebrates works that employ an aesthetic tendency grown conspicuous in the past three decades of world art cinema. The aesthetics of ‘slow cinema’ can be broadly characterised by a combination of long takes and long shots, with a focus on non-professional actors and an emphasis on everyday activities. If contemporary culture is governed by speed and distraction, these films open up time for stillness and contemplation. Leading figures in the cannon include Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang, Abbas Kierostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lisandro Alonso, and Pedro Costa. Though a number of slow films reach gargantuan lengths, some exceeding 10 hours, slow films more generally have running times comparable with mainstream productions, suggesting that it is the film’s form and content, rather than its length, that make it slow. With this in mind, we exhibit short films (under 45 minutes) that engage with the principles of slow cinema.