Uppsala Short Film Festival
20—26.10.2025
The first snow of the year. The cinema of Ingmar Bergman’s childhood. Long conversations about films in the festival bar. And rather expensive beer (as everywhere in Sweden), which probably only guests coming from Switzerland and Norway order without a moment’s hesitation. These are some of the first associations that come to mind when thinking about the international short film festival in Uppsala, a small and somewhat sleepy university town not far from Stockholm.
And indeed, Uppsala is a special case in the European short film festival landscape. Because rarely is there a festival where you pretty much know in advance what you’re going to get – and where what you get is almost always pretty great. The venues, it feels like, have been the same for ages; the hangout spots are within walking distance; and the film selection is mostly exquisite (with some extravagant outliers thrown in for good measure).
On the one hand, this may be due to the fact that the festival already has 40 years under its belt and thus simply brings with it a wealth of experience (including the enviable early step of securing the domain shortfilmfestival.com for the festival). On the other hand, this mixture of routine and familiarity is certainly also a result of the well-coordinated team around Niklas Due Gillberg, Christoffer Ode, and Sigrid Hadenius-Ebner, who, year after year, caringly put together a diverse and challenging film and seminar program—the details of which are then, of course, discussed with relish at the bar.
Text by Daniel Hadenius-Ebner
Reading List
Sewing Machine by Ülo Pikkov
Man Number 4 by Miranda Pennell
A Conversation with Gaza Film Unit’s Eslam Saqqa and Ayman Alazraq
Elahe Esmaili on A Move
City of Poets by Sara Rajaei
The One Who Knows by Eglė Davidavičė
The Oasis I Deserve by Inès Sieulle
Noir-Soleil by Marie Larrivé
Steakhouse by Špela Čadež
Flores del otro Patio by Jorge Cadena
Daydreaming So Vividly About Our Spanish Holidays by Christian Avilés
Hardly Working by Total Refusal
27 by Flóra Anna Buda
Reading List
The Un-chaotic Cabinet That Wishes For Me To Sleep by Cilian Laurence Green
On the Works of Antoinette Zwirchmayr
Remember How I Used to Ride a White Horse by Ivana Bošnjak Volda, Thomas Johnson Volda
Skinned by Joachim Hérissé
The Miracle by Nienke Deutz
Reading List
Reading List
Love, Dad by Diana Cam Van Nguyen
Deconstructing Realism In The Modern Day
Neon Phantom by Leonardo Martinelli
Noir-Soleil by Marie Larrivé
Tracing Utopia by Catarina de Sousa, Nick Tyson
Reading List
Reading List
All on a Mardi Gras Day by Michal Pietrzyk
Apfelmus by Alexander Gratzer
Past Perfect by Jorge Jácome
Something To Remember by Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Symbiosis by Nadja Andrasev
Eyes on the Road by Stefanie Kolk
