225 Film Club Official Selection, 2025 – reviews and award winners

225 Film Club festival audience, 2025 (photo credits Zuzu Valla)

Last Friday 5 December, our female and non-binary filmmakers, their crews and stars, and industry professionals came together for the seventh 225 Film Club’s Official Selection screening night, held once again at the BFI. The festival was hosted by director Rita Osei, who created, curates and produces the 225 Film Club, with the screening supported by BFI Inclusion headed by Melanie Hoyes.

“Half film & TV lawyer, half comedian” Mohini Kotecha was on hand to MC at the beginning of the night: thanking sponsors and sharing voting instructions for the audience award vote, plus throwing in some hilarious and well received film and TV lawyer jokes.

The 225 Film Club is dedicated to female excellence in direction, and these 17 short films – from an incredibly talented group of filmmakers – explore topics as diverse as grief, identity, the power of women in Victorian spiritualism and a malevolent goose.

This year’s awards | Meet our jury | Reviews | Event photos and posters

This year’s awards

Our Best Short Film UK and Best Short Film International award winners are chosen by an exceptional industry jury.

Our Audience Award is chosen exclusively by the audience in the cinema on Friday 5 December.

The Lioness award

This year sponsors of The Lioness award designed by Caroline Wheaton include Focus Canning, ArtCan, Tysers Live, Times Up UK.

After a long and thoughtful discussion, the jury awarded the following:

Best Short Film UK – Hsieh Meng Han’s The Test

Special Mention – Tortor Smith’s Hot Mess

Best Short Film International – Ruth Hunduma’s The Medallion

Special Mention – Lyna Tadount and Sofian Chouaib’s Ya Hanouni

The Audience award winner is Naomi Waring’s Milk:

The film highlights the UK’s baby formula crisis. Following sustained pressure from the “Formula for Change” campaign and advocates like Waring, a delegation delivered an open letter to Downing Street in July 2025. In late 2025, Sir Keir Starmer announced that the government would review and take action regarding the infant formula crisis, a direct result of the campaign’s efforts.

Joint Special Mention – Alina Bichieva’s Paranoia and Catherine Joy White’s Swim Sistas.

Meet the Jury

This year’s 225 Film Club jurists include screenwriters, directors, producers and distributors.

Chairing the jury once more is producer, mentor and entrepreneur Brenda Gilbert. Brenda sits on the Boards of the Banff World Media Festival, Film Independent, FAAAF (Foundation For The Augmentation Of African Americans In Film) and WOCU (Women Of Color Unite). Her producer credits include The Willoughbys, Loudmouth and Reggie. Brenda is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and co founded the former studio Bron Media, their credits include Licorice Pizza, Queen & Slim and Joker.

British comedy lovers may know BAFTA-winning screenwriter and director Nida Manzoor best as the creator of the riotous We Are Lady Parts, the hugely successful and innovative sitcom about an all-women Muslim punk band.

Film producer Sheila Nortley is one of our brightest creative talents behind the camera, driven by her passion for storytelling and a desire to bring unseen stories to the screen. Sheila’s feature films and shorts have all screened at international film festivals, and she now leads Osun Group’s ambitious film and TV slate as Head of Drama.

BAFTA- and BIFA- nominated producer and juror, Danielle Goff, at 225 Film Club festival

As a working-class, queer woman of British, Jamaican and Algerian heritage, the BAFTA- and BIFA-nominated producer Danielle Goff brings perspectives that have not always been given enough prominence in the British film industry.

A 225 Film Club alumnus, Danielle produced the 2023 award winning short The Call alongside another jury member, Susan Simnett.

Chilean director and screenwriter Cristián Jiménez’s feature films have premiered In Competition at Cannes (Un Certain Regard), and at San Sebastián, Toronto and Sundance.

Emmy Award-winning storyteller Colin Laviola has made his distribution company 7 Palms Entertainment a go-to destination for filmmakers. Over nearly a decade 7 Palms has partnered with more than 1,400 films, bringing them to leading platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Europe, Apple TV, Canal+, and many others.

Rounding out our jury this year is film producer Susan Simnett, whose company Over The Fence Films combines meaning, high quality filmmaking and a commercial end game. A 225 Film Club alumnus, Susan produced the 2023 winning short The Call. Susan’s feature credits include documentary Fadia’s Tree and narrative feature Chuck Chuck Baby. She is an Executive Producer on the Sundance-premiering Brides.
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Reviews

Check out my reviews of the 225 Film Club Official Selection shorts, 2025

ARENA – Simin Zeng (13.57) (STUDENT FILM)
A powerful exploration of identity in an industry that claims to search for truth. Alex, a non-binary actor, auditions for the role of a boxer in a music video.

Arena director Simin Zeng, at 225 Film Club festival

The director is rude and belittling, until he sees something about Alex that convinces him he has found his boxer. This heady high contrasts with the lows of the shoot itself, where Alex finds their identity deconstructed leaving the actor adrift.

Zeng’s film is an absorbing study in the realities of filmmaking, and a forceful plea for autonomy and respect; one person’s vision does not excuse the stripping back of your artists. Nicole Joseph as Alex owns her power as Alex fights back against the industry crush.

BLUFF – Naomi Wright (9.47)
Three superb performances elevate this short story about two children not understanding the implications of what they do, and cast adrift by a clunky labyrinthine system. Desperate to go on holiday to the beach with their mother, Nat (Kara Caldwell), egged on by her older sister Chrissie (Kayla Caldwell), downplays her symptoms, while their mother (Joanna Thomson) tries to navigate the NHS for answers, distracted by a system supposedly there to help.

The exposed, windblown coastline has an old-fashioned look to it, heady with nostalgic hues, of childhood holidays repeated down the generations, freedom but at a potentially huge cost.

BRIDGE – Tara Aghdashloo (15.55)
Director Aghdashloo and her co-scriptwriter Gemma Barnett have chosen the perfect setting: a busy GP surgery that can only function along regimented lines, but which is by its nature creaking at the seams with human stories that don’t fit into convenient appointment slots.

Bridge director Tara Aghdashloo

Bianca Beckles-Rose is particularly good as Kirsty, a spiky, terrified mum who finally makes a meaningful connection in Bridge. Wary, suspicious, sometimes moving forward to take the proffered hand of Bridget (Barnett), a GP receptionist, sometimes abruptly cutting the thin thread from a past that links them, Kirsty is both frustrating and frustrated.

Meanwhile Bridget has to juggle calls to the surgery and deal with the on-the-spot human dramas of some of the patients. This is a warm but realistic fable about spotting the ones who need that little extra help even in a busy and often antagonistic environment; and the meaning this can add to our own lives.

HIGHWAY TO THE MOON – Letitia Wright (25.00)
Wright’s directorial debut is a powerful and heartfelt story set in the “in-between”; Wright herself has described her film as “a love letter to young black boys all over the world”, and she sets their pain, bewilderment and eventual understanding of how they have arrived there against the vastness and immutability of the landscape, and indeed the universe.

The in-between is that space between Earth and Heaven, where black teenage boys and young men who have suffered violent deaths find and support each other as they prepare for the final journey. The newly-arrived Micah (an impressive Kenyah Sandy), initially shocked and confused, finds solidarity and guidance with the others he finds already there. The moon always above them, the landscape of red sandstone and brush is a literal safe space as they wrestle with their own grief and try to come to terms with what has brought them there.

Wright’s has a keen eye for the power of landscapes and her characterisation is deft. Micah and his new friends’ unity and love for each other is constant and constantly reinforced: “You’re not just a boy, you’re a king.”

HOT MESS – Tortor Smith (STUDENT FILM) (3.09)
A highly effective stop motion animation short that explores the reality of living with a neurodivergent brain. And I’m quite sure many viewers will watch with a sigh of relief and recognition.

Andro, who has ADHD, is listening to a voicemail from their mother, who may be well-meaning but is also making Andro’s life worse.

Hot Mess director Tortor Smith at 225 Film Club festival

As she scolds, belittles, and lobs extra bricks at her slowly-sinking adult child, the accusatory evidence of a thousand past projects, bright ideas and new best things move and spin just out of reach as Andro tries to clear up, to organise, to understand.

Filmmaker Tortor Smith has created a very good visual take on how it feels when friends and family, aware of the what but not the why, can’t help making things worse. Its short length also illustrates the busy, buzzy, jumping nature of an ADHD mind. The mother too looks to have ADHD, with hers, after a lifetime of trying to juggle her own life around her symptoms, presenting very differently to Andro’s.

I’M NOT SURE – Mylissa Fitzsimmons (16.30)
A moving vignette about two lost souls, one at the beginning of an adventure and the other beaten down by what real life has turned out to be. Charlie, the depressed night manager, ropes in the young and naïve Brigitte to help him get a room ready. There is more than one imbalance of power though Charlie seems too lost in his own misery to realise and Brigette is too inexperienced to spot them. Though already she looks to try and save him.

The setting taps into that tired, fraying beauty of American highway life, a familiar movie vista that nevertheless did not unfold in the way I expected. The performances are perfectly pitched and I would love to see more of the two characters: Charlie’s past and Brigette’s future.

THE MEDALLION – Ruth Hunduma (19.00) (DOCUMENTARY)
Tsehay Ayele, who survived the Ethiopian Red Terror genocide in the 1970s, looks back on those terrifying days, in this shocking and sobering film dedicated to “The Forgotten” and made by her daughter Ruth Hunduma.

Best Short Film International winner Ruth Hunduma introduces her documentary

Starting with memories of an ordinary home life, Tsehay and her brothers reminisce with laughter about boys in the family getting the belt, laughing at those traditions of family corporal punishment “olden day style”. But then the warm family chatter gives way to intruding snippets of aged footage, soldiers marching, normal life yielding to terror.

Ayele tells her story of this little-known genocide straightforwardly; she is not unemotional, simply matter of fact, as she explains the horrors of the Red Terror and the everyday tortuous violence they brought with them. Combined with paintings, poetry and contemporary footage, Hunduma and her mum take us on a shocking but essential journey into a dark period when university educated young men were killed on masse, lest they threaten Mengistu’s communist regime. The medallion itself is a talisman, a necklace given to Tsehay on her long escape from the genocide.

MILK – Naomi Waring (15.00)
Alisha (a brilliant and hugely affecting Tia Bannon) is a single mother, trying to bring up two children in poverty. Her baby needs feeding, and Alisha’s struggle to buy formula lays bare the indifference, judgement and spite she faces, and the humiliation as she considers ways to resolve her dilemma that she would never usually countenance.

Audience Award winner and Director of Milk, Naomi Waring

And while Alisha ponders the security tag on the formula she can’t afford, in the next isle a succulent display of food taunts her while the shop offers a lecture in place of a support.

Waring’s well-paced and moving film takes place only over an hour or two, but still expertly entwines not just the long-existing threads trapping Alisha but also the strength of motherhood, dedication of mothers, and the power of small good deeds, even though they shouldn’t be needed in our society.

MY GRIEF ISN’T GRIEF ENOUGH – Jen Lim (5.55)
Lim instantly sets the scene with just a few shots: an English country church with its ancient stained glass window, a busy spider and a fading flower arrangement. It’s a place both slightly neglected regarding the nice-to-haves but holding fast to what really matters.

Sister Briony (Zulekha Chaka) and best friend Natalie (Maxine Bonett) argue behind the scenes over who “should” be giving the eulogy for Amelia, her funeral taking place right now.

Chaka is particularly good as the mourning but brittle and self-justifying Briony, who still thinks blood is always thicker than water, especially when there’s an audience. The talented Lim also made last year’s short, sharp and (hilariously) shocking Discord, one of my favourites from 2024’s festival.

MORNING – Olivia Jane Middleton (6.30)
The aftermath of a devastating but common tragedy unfolds in Morning, as a young couple deal with their grief and the immediate practicalities.

Separate about the house but entirely in tune with each other’s feelings, their fingers scrub in unison as they try to expunge the immediacy of what they have just been through. This is a profoundly moving film that pauses on the harrowing emptiness of miscarriage without ever intruding, and understands the sheer loneliness of its horror even though it is an experience that is all too common.

MOTHER GOOSE – Joanna Vymeris (12.40)
A sharp and darkly funny look at grief, loneliness – and possibly romance scammers? This black and white short about a widowed farmer’s wife raising a gosling to adulthood is one of my favourites from this year’s selection. Starting off looking like a warm and sorrowful look at ageing and bereavement, it soon veers off into uncharted territory.

Janet is desperate for something to fill her empty days and empty farm; the cavernous barns are bare and her house is immaculately clean. Enter a fluffy gosling, kept in a pen in the garden but soon starting to intrude into Janet’s life.

I hesitate to say much more as I don’t want to spoil the plot twist. Or indeed the other plot twist. Nor am I going to say whether or not goose boy ends up in a roasting tin on Christmas morning. That goose is fighting for its life and surely in those circumstances anything goes? Starring Sophie Thompson and Ralph Ineson – actors and characters pretty evenly matched – you might decide after watching this that it’s time for a plant-based Christmas after all.

PARANOIA – Alina Bichieva (15.22)
Paranoia explores the type of situation so many women will be familiar with, especially the immediate and sustained pressure to lower boundaries from the first minute. Gila has been on a date with “finance bro” Taylor; now he’s back in her flat and whinging about the options of a walk home or a lumpy sofa for the night. He’s crudely obvious in his gaslighting, but we, and she, can still see her options reducing as he manipulates her.

What happens during the night is terrifying and also recognition that punishment for women is as much in the process as in the end game. Ella-Rae Smith is terrific as Gila, instincts fighting society’s pressures to be kind every step of the way. And a word too for set dresser Daisy Mojave-Holland. Gila’s small flat is perfect: the personal clutter, the style, her curated safe space that becomes a nightmare.

RETURN – Sophia Carr-Gomm (11.13)

Return director Sophia Carr-Gomm at 225 Film Club festival

An exceptionally evocative film without dialogue about an old man’s desperation to reunite with his wife who has died years earlier. Peter Faulkner is superb as the man, isolated in his cottage. His agitation grows, sated only when we see him as a young man with her.

Meanwhile the barriers between him and her seem initially feel unbreachable: life and death, age, exhaustion and even the geometric sea defence blocks keep him from her.

The film was created to illustrate the haunting score, composed by Ben Raworth.

SPEAK WITH THE DEAD – Stephanie Paris (12.12)
A terrifically chilling period drama that packs a hell of a diabolical punch in its 12 minutes. Paris’s film about American spiritualists getting a taste of their own medicine – and the limited options available for young women then – has its roots in truth: Maggie and Kate Fox were real-life young mediums who conned the gullible and sad in 19th century America with party tricks and smooth patter. Kate (Aster Laine), the youngest, looking like a cross between Laura from Little House on the Prairie and Wednesday Addams, supposedly speaks to the dead, relaying their messages to the bereaved; while the older Maggie (an excellent Audrey Grace Marshall) leads the session and keeps order as they follow their well-trodden path.

This time Maggie is soon out of her depth, a resident sceptic the least of her problems as more spirits want to chat and the audience turn out to have secrets of their own. What works so well is that they are revealed gradually; there’s something up, but what?

SWIM SISTAS – Catherine Joy White (11.11) (DOCUMENTARY)
A gorgeously poetic and thought-provoking documentary, beautifully blending the past (both history and myth) and present. Naomie Harris helps give voice to the water goddess Mami Wata, while four Black women swimmers explain the barriers they broke through and what they find in the water: freedom, confidence, competition, and (for Alice Dearing, Great Britain’s only black female Olympian swimmer) also sacrifice.

Swim Sistas is testament to the resilience of black women while the casual and institutional racism the film’s participants have had to endure contrasts with the prize: the solace they can find in the water, whether striving to be their competitive racing best or losing themselves in a swimming pond (“an anti gravity feeling” as Jasmine Boatswain describes it). Some learned to swim as children, while Roni Bruno finally bought some lessons in her 50s, sick of missing out on the fun her swimming friends took for granted. Roni is a hoot – “I went to Cape Verdi for 10 days, didn’t get wet once!” – but also her bravery standing on that edge proves it is absolutely never too late to take the plunge.

THE TEST – Hsieh Meng Han (11.49)
Based on a true story, this is an illuminating look at the process of achieving British citizenship, from the point of view of young Taiwanese woman Huang I-Ling.

Best Short Film UK winner, director Hsieh Meng Han

The bureaucrats’ petty spites and complete lack of knowledge about the backgrounds of the people taking the test (a multiple choice quiz of historical questions few Brits would be able to answer) not only show a system designed with lazy humiliation in mind but also contrasts with the hoops the applicants have to jump through. I-Ling is exactly the kind of new arrival politicians keep declaring the country needs while still making the process as aggressive as possible for her; Lau is terrific, I-Ling’s growing frustrations clear even as she knows she has to play the game no matter how much she wants to speak up.

The score sounds like something from a 1950s sci-fi show; fitting when you consider both the obfuscating rules I-Ling has to navigate and that it is the decade many Britain nostalgists hark back to.

YA HANOUNI – Lyna Tadount and Sofian Chouaib (3.00)
A mum and dad lean over a cot, jokingly fighting each other to teach their baby to say its first word. But danger lurks outside, and comes closer with every thunder-like crash. Tadount and Chouaib have crafted a very short but hugely affecting film about love, and parents trying to protect their child from war in the only ways available to them, while also trying to have a normal, family life. Without giving too much away, the direction of the film’s focus shows how they alone are the baby’s world, while they try to hold back the horrors outside.

Ya Hanouni (the phrase is an Arabic term of endearment) reminded me of one of the best entries from last year’s festival: The Woman in the Wardrobe, another short about resilience and the determination to protect a baby against the backdrop of war.
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