Quick Dips: Experimental Shorts 3

Seven experimental short films from the UK and Greece, exploring our relationships to the Earth and each other.

The Parents Room

In a children's hospital, the Parents Room is offered as a place of respite: a kettle, some tea, a few hard chairs. It is a limbo where exhausted parents make toast side by side, silent with thoughts of their own child. Shot entirely on a mobile phone by a mother during her daughter's treatment, The Parents Room captures, in under one minute, the raw, quiet devastation of a space where you are allowed to fall apart but only until someone else walks in.

Julia Harriman | UK | 2026 | N/C | 55 secs

Apparent Time

In horology 'Apparent Time’ is the act of measuring time by observing the shadows cast on a surface produced by the sun’s rays falling onto an object. 

'Apparent Time' is an 11-minute film, with sound, formed from a handful of archival photographs, slides, and postcards, the un-doing of woven fabric, and the erasure of a tattoo. 

The film’s central subject is a photograph titled, 'Photo 9 - Boat on the spot where Elugelab once stood, now a crater, 1972’ taken in Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 20 years after the nuclear device ‘Mike’ was detonated there, completely vaporising and 'undoing' the island of Elugelab. 

Karen Cunningham | UK | 2023 | N/C | 11 mins

An exercise in solitude

A short film about walking with technology, as a way to re-think solitude. Filmed and written on an iPhone, during the Covid-19 UK lockdowns.

Beverley Hood | UK | 2022 | N/C | 5 mins 38 secs

Collecting Light

Collecting Light documents the first workshops with The Living Camera project which took place at Lyth Arts Centre with its youth community in 2025. Shot on 16mm, the film follows a collaborative analogue workshop centred around the site-specific camera obscura, which transforms into a darkroom and gathering space.

Participants are seen constructing pinhole cameras, foraging local plants and inhabiting the obscura. The film documents how collective and regenerative image-making can support new ways of seeing, living, and learning - offering creative tools for the challenges of our time. 

Jessica-Anne Holdengarde & Chloe Charlton | UK | 2026 | N/C | 11 mins 48 secs

Daphne was a torso ending in leaves

The mythical metamorphosis of the nymph Daphne into a bay-laurel tree is reapproached in contemporary Rome, a landscape once surrounded by native laurel forests and still home to persistent depictions of the woman-tree-symbol in laurel wreaths and festoons. From hedges in parks & gardens to laureates for graduating students, Daphne (δἀφνη/alloro/bay-laurel) is both the subject of the film and the key ingredient of its making. 

Catriona Gallagher | Greece | 2024 | N/C | 13 mins 30 secs

Lullaby for Troubled Times

Written in response to global anxiety, the song is designed to be a comforting piece of music for difficult times. 

The song features Scots language and is designed with a simple, repetitive refrain ("Ae-o, ae-o") to encourage participation. It touches on themes of enduring, loving, and finding peace after "rain" (fear). 

Pat Law | UK | 2025 | N/C | 3 mins 8 secs

WEYBOURNE

Director Amy Winwood Fisher says: “This film is of my brother, Angus, dancing on Weybourne beach. I spent a month in North Norofolk spending a lot of time by the beach and swimming in the sea. As a dancer myself I wanted to express through movement and film the experience of being so close to the water and nature. The sea calls to me strongly and I wanted to capture the pull towards it.”

Amy Winwood Fisher | UK | 2026 | N/C | 4 mins 30 secs