The BFI’s London Film Festival is shaping up spectacularly this year, with screenings across 15 cinemas in London’s West End showcasing a whopping 242 films. We’ve trawled through the catalogue and selected five films that are well worth watching on the big screen.

This year’s London Film Festival boasts a stellar 30 SP members within their generous shorts programmes this year. We can’t spotlight them all, so here are five short films you may want to see. Members, please share your films and screenings in our bulletins, so everyone knows where to see them. In the meantime, a cross section of some, below.

Starting today, it’s Encounters. Alongside our event programme preview, and our interviews with some SP members with films in the festival, below we spotlight some more of the great short films made by the Shooting People community, with links to where you can see them.

Ahead of Bristol’s Encounters Festival we’ve spoken to several of our very own shooters about the festival. These filmmakers with films in the competition told us about their entries, motivations, and what got them to where they are now.

Across some of the best work in Open City Documentary Festival‘s shorts programmes, one connecting thread could be drawn. Many of the selected films explored ways of documenting the workings (or failures) of the mind, batches of short films that look at mental health and cognitive failures, or acts of remembering and forgetting, learning anew. These films often used experimental forms to express psychological states, or mixed found and recorded materials to cross timelines and connect generations. The best of them evoked the sensation of being inside the heads of those involved, without exploiting the difficulties that entails.

To celebrate the release of Tomas’ Leach’s latest documentary The Lure, Bertha DocHouse have arranged a special treasure hunt so that the SP community can join the search.

One of, if not the, premiere event(s) in the UK short film calendar, Encounters Festival commences its 23rd edition in late September. We’ve swept the breadth of their ever extensive programme to find the treats hiding in the corners. Here’s five event picks from us that give a sense of something of what the festival has to offer.

In the beginning was the word, but that’s only ever just the start…

I have an increasingly heretical stance on scripts. The contradictions inherent in the process of writing for the screen have troubled me before but the whole truth is that when it comes to scripts I find myself like a priest in a Graham Greene novel.

Now online, the programme for Open City Doc Fest‘s 7th edition is looking like a stellar one, with 36 UK Premieres across 13 venues, and a host of special events. Dedicated to providing “an open space in London to nurture and champion the art of creative documentary and non-fiction filmmakers,” the festival has been exhibiting the kind of challenging, formally daring and complex work that is becoming increasingly popular recently, through other London festival Frames of Representation, and in the programmes of larger international festivals like Sheffield Doc/Fest, CPH:DOX or DokuFest. Here we select just five of the many surprises on offer, five opportunities to see something unusual or outlier within the comforts of the city.

Shuffle Festival returns this August for its fifth year. The festival exhibits creativity through film, science, performance,  architectural installations, walks, food, and music every year. Shuffle is primarily a grassroots, not-for-profit organisation that evolved from local activism at the St. Clements site and has taken root as an important part of cultural life and community cohesion in Mile End. With just under a month until the annual Shuffle Festival rolls around, we’ve looked over this year’s offering and picked five events from a packed weekend.