Judging the 11th Femme Filmmakers Festival

I was delighted to be invited to join the jury for the 11th Femme Filmmakers Festival, watching and discussing the 17 short films in this year’s Competition Selection.

The festival, hosted online by Filmotomy, ran from 14 to 23 August, bringing together short films from filmmakers around the world and spanning animation, documentary, drama, comedy, thriller and experimental work - alongside a feature film programme, and further short films.

Being a juror is rather different from simply watching films. Instead of asking myself whether I liked something, I found myself returning to questions of craft, originality, performance and, increasingly, what stayed with me after the film had finished. There were films I admired enormously for their technical achievement, others whose performances remained with me, and some where a particular use of sound, editing or visual design completely changed the way I experienced the story.

It was a strong and varied programme, which made choosing the winners far from straightforward.

The films

There was a real breadth of filmmaking across the competition.

I Felt Like Magic by Emma Josephson offered an intimate, fleeting look at two childhood friends confronting what it means to grow up, while Fairground by Jess Berry captured the pull between the familiarity of family life and the excitement of first love and independence.

Songs of Salt by Isabella Bazoni took us to the coastal communities of the Riviera Romagnola, where generations of families have built their lives and livelihoods around the sea. Its combination of interviews, location footage, music, family photographs and newspaper imagery created a thoughtful portrait of people, place and threatened traditions.

There were several films that particularly demonstrated the possibilities of animation. Kati Egely's Ha nacido un niño / A Child Was Born used 2D paper animation to bring different religions and traditions together through a simple message about compassion and equality. Louise Bongartz's En mille pétales / In Thousand Petals was an astonishing piece of stop-motion animation, with its wood-and-paper aesthetic providing an extraordinarily tactile visual world.

And then there was Natalia Mirzoyan's Winter in March, which became my standout animation of the competition. Using fabric, textiles and stitching to create its puppet animation, the film tells the story of a young couple leaving Russia from Dasha's perspective. The scale, texture and sound create a world that feels both fragile and substantial, perfectly complementing a story about displacement and uncertainty.

Storytelling itself was approached in very different ways. Stick Bug, directed by Wylie Anderson and Talia Frank-Stempel, uses two timelines to tell a story of friendship, intimacy and possible reconnection. I particularly enjoyed its elliptical structure and the way the relationship between the two timelines gradually becomes clearer.

Amanda Valle's Loneliness Doesn't Come Alone is similarly personal, drawing on the director's childhood memories of waiting for a father who promises to arrive every Tuesday at 2pm. Narrated from Valle's perspective and dedicated to her mother, its recreated memories acquire another emotional resonance when the photographs on which they are based are revealed.

Dirt, directed by Isabella Speaight, stood out for its visual storytelling and its depiction of a single mother and her son. The claustrophobic family home contrasts with dreamlike sequences in nature, particularly the mother's solitary swimming, as she begins to reconnect with herself beyond her role as a parent.

Beam Me Up by Roxana Stroe found warmth and humanity in an ordinary workplace. A London Underground lift operator is facing redundancy when his manually operated lift is replaced by an automated system. Although set in the late 1980s, the film has an almost timeless quality, making its story of technological change and the people left behind feel surprisingly universal.

There were also films tackling difficult subjects directly. Maybrick, by Charlotte Rose Ainsworth and Lorna Lennon-Dalziel, dramatises the Victorian case of Florence Maybrick and examines the ways gender, class and social expectations shaped the case against her. Immaterial by Alexandra Healy occupies a recognisably British social realist world, following Naomi as she cares for her mother in hospital while struggling with trauma, addiction and difficult relationships. Cathy Ellington's Overlooked: A Silent Extinction takes a documentary approach to the dramatic decline in giraffe populations. There are some distressing images, but the film's central message is an important one: an animal can be seriously threatened without receiving anything like the public attention given to more familiar conservation stories.

And Fish, written by Cara Mahoney and directed by Ian Yarwood, takes a more upbeat approach to coming out and bisexual identity, finding humour and optimism in Suzanna's late discovery of a new world of dating and self-discovery.

Sound as storytelling

One of the things that particularly struck me during the judging was the number of films where sound wasn't simply an accompaniment to the image.

This was especially true of Dina Naser's Sukoun / Amplified. Hind is a young deaf karate athlete whose sense of safety is shattered by an incident at her training centre. The film uses sound perspective to place us inside Hind's experience, moving between her perception and the fuller soundscape of those around her.

It is a remarkably effective directorial choice because the sound design isn't decoration. It is part of the storytelling.

Malak Nassar's central performance is equally important. Hind's reactions, silences and attempts to process what has happened communicate much of what the film needs us to understand without spelling everything out.

Catherine Joy White's Swim Sistas takes a very different approach to sound. As a year-round sea swimmer myself, I immediately connected with its celebration of the sheer pleasure of being in water, but the film is about much more than swimming.

It brings together Black women swimmers across generations, from an Olympic swimmer to a woman learning to swim at 54. Its poetry, narration and music combine to create a rhythm that feels almost like swimming itself.

The film also carries an important message about representation and access to water, particularly in the context of the very low participation in swimming among Black British people. But it never loses sight of joy. The water becomes a place of freedom, healing, community and possibility.

And the winners...

After watching all 17 films, considering the individual categories and discussing the contenders, the final awards were:

Gold Sovereign – Grand Prize En mille pétales / In Thousand Petals – Louise Bongartz, Bastien Martin, Christophe Beaujean and Jérémie Mazurek

Silver Sword – Second Prize Sukoun / Amplified – Dina Naser and Batoul Ibrahim

Bronze Bell – Third Prize Winter in March – Natalia Mirzoyan, Kadriann Kibus and Armine Harutyunyan

Directing Dina Naser – Sukoun / Amplified

Female Performance Holly Higbee – Immaterial

Male Performance Nigel Betts – Beam Me Up

Writing Amanda Valle – Loneliness Doesn't Come Alone

Cinematography Seana Rogovin – Stick Bug

Editing Kati Egely – Ha nacido un niño / A Child Was Born

Music Hollie Buhagiar – Swim Sistas

Sound Design Ensieh Maleki and Danial Al-Masa'deh – Sukoun / Amplified

Visual Design Clémence Rogge, Louise Bongartz, Francisco Martins Fontes and Siona Vidakovic – En mille pétales / In Thousand Petals

Mixed Media Natalia Mirzoyan – Winter in March

We also awarded a Special Contribution Prize to Cathy Ellington for Overlooked: A Silent Extinction, recognising both the scope of the filmmaking and the importance of its conservation message.

A difficult choice

What made the judging particularly rewarding was that there wasn't one definition of what makes a great short film.

Some of the winners were recognised for extraordinary technical craft. Others were about performance, writing or the way a filmmaker found an original way into their subject. Some films worked through realism, others through animation or experimentation.

For me, Winter in March, Stick Bug, Sukoun / Amplified, Swim Sistas, Dirt and En mille pétales / In Thousand Petals were among the films that stayed with me most strongly, but for very different reasons.

That, ultimately, is what I enjoyed about the experience. Judging forced me to look more closely at why a film had affected me, rather than simply deciding whether I liked it.

It was a privilege to be part of the jury and to spend so much time discovering the work of these filmmakers. The Femme Filmmakers Festival has always been about celebrating women filmmakers and creating a space for their work to be seen and discussed, and this year's Competition Selection offered plenty of evidence of just how diverse that work can be.

Congratulations to all the filmmakers who took part, and especially to this year's winners. Read more about them here.