Quick Dips Shorts: Voices from the Edge

Four UK and European short films about humans, mountains, and coasts.

On Common Ground

It's 1837, and young writer Ida seeks inspiration in the romantic landscapes of the Germanic Harz Mountains, only to reconsider her goals after failing to reach the range's highest summit. She comes to see landscapes as both products of culture and living systems with their own vitality.

Defying her tutors, the Brothers Grimm, she travels instead to Ireland's Beara Peninsula, encountering the Ardgroom Stone Circle and the Copper Mines at Allihies. There she meets local miner Marie Elizabeth Dillane, and through their shared interest in geology and literature, a friendship of camaraderie and mutual respect deepens. Dillane's understanding of the slow life of rocks reshapes how Ida thinks about geological time, creativity, and her own privilege as a traveller and writer.

Michelle Deignan | UK | 2024 | N/C | 40 mins

Cold Water Sirens

A community-driven short about what cold-water surfing truly looks, sounds, and feels like. Built from everyday stories, it follows a group of female surfers in Northern Denmark preparing for a surf day - frozen locks, flat car batteries, laughter, and the challenge of catching a wave in daylight. A soundtrack by local artist Sara Sandahl echoes both the playfulness and the melancholy of cold, grey mornings. Rather than spectacle, the film centers the in-between moments: community, and showing up no matter what.

Lena Siebertz | Denmark | 2026 | N/C | 9 mins 53 secs

Their Accounts

Inspired by the often-unheard voices of Scottish highland youth, this documentary captures the perspectives of young people living in Ardnamurchan, the most westerly point on the British mainland. Through interviews shaped by traditional oral storytelling, they share their thoughts on the past, present, and future of their home and culture.

Hannah Kate Cameron Hunter | UK | 2023 | N/C | 5 mins 48 secs

Between Tides

On Scotland's east coast, a group of women and queer people forms a research collective exploring their relationships to the surrounding water geography. Through sound-making, recording, listening, and storytelling, they move with the landscape and the water's capacity to both connect and divide. Their work touches on the harmony between local, generational knowledge of landscapes and the vulnerability of learning to re-imagine them.

Clara J:son Borg | UK | 2026 | N/C | 30 mins