Not so long ago I wrote a short piece about how long a short should be. My friend and fellow surgeon Phil Ilson saw this and as a result asked if I’d care to help him out of a scheduling jam and present his forthcoming selection of long shorts at the London Short Film Festival.

The event is at the Shortwave Cinema in Bermondsey this coming Sunday, 10th January, at 1.30pm. Philip has selected four short films which jeer in the face of the word short.

THE GLOAMING by John Bradburn & Andy Paton sees nature test the limits of love.

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING by Ben Rivers is a series of meetings with those who live at the edge of civilisation.

KINGS OF LONDON by Sean Conway is oddly even harder to summerise despite being, in someways, the most conventional narrative drama in the programme but it involves urban horse racing, two brothers both called Aristotle and a child gangster.

RED SANDS by David Procter is a documentary about bullfighting which is as violent as it is beautiful.

What really strikes me about the programme is not only that the films are all exceptionally long, exceptionally beautiful and I struggled to not describe all four as “poetic” but that they all revel in their length. Previously I wrote that often long shorts come about through people aping the pacing of a feature film. However with these it is more that they have their own unique pace, a long short pace.

For instance, The Gloaming, which will be getting it’s theatrical premiere at the event, has no dialogue. I Know Where I’m Going has no synchronised dialogue and takes a special care to hold its shots for far longer than a feature director would dare. These are not features that lack a second act, they are films that could only ever have been this long. Shorter they’d lack their peculiar, but so intense are they that any longer and they’d leave you utterly exhausted.

Sadly not all the directors are able to attend but I will be discussing each film with someone from the project and I’ll also be hoping to delve a little deeper into the demands and dangers of the longer duration.

Do come.

More information here http://lsff.bside.com/2010/films/newshorts7howlongisshort_lsff2010 but for tickets please ring the Shortwave Cinema on 0207 357 6845