Noli: The Too Long, Too Difficult, Too Raw Short Film Festival

We will be uniting for our fifth edition on Saturday May 30th 2026, again at our beautiful home at Etcetera Theatre in Camden, London.

Noli is the festival for short films too experimental, too fresh, too radical, too real, too cheap or simply too long for the mainstream circuit. This year we will be returning to our twice-yearly schedule, with one edition in May and another in Autumn/Winter 2026.

Our fourth edition was our most successful yet and our fifth promises to be even more special as our name spreads further both at home and abroad- this is your chance to be part of something that matters.

As mainstream and off-mainstream cinema continues to drive itself into mannerist and manicured dead ends, we are looking to champion a New Wave of filmmaking, showcasing works that have a unique perspective on cinema and on modern life. We love pieces that eschew commercial narratives and industry kowtowing in favour of a bold vision, innovative techniques, and a clear aim in perspective & idea on the world through art. We want to be the change we wish to see, jumpstarting a dormant medium and ushering in an unshackled, subversive cinema through avant-garde fables, piercing essay films, delirious animations and honest and well-crafted stories.

We want to reflect the new, in a way that is authentically inclusive of fringe artists that are truly contributing to the medium but feel like they have no home, whether you've frequented the institutional channels like BFI, or are indie through-and-through.

Hence – TOO LONG, TOO DIFFICULT, TOO REAL.

Ie. – TOO CREATIVE. TOO HUMAN.

As such, we are looking for realised FILMS.

Previous programmes included a modern noir following an online erotic fiction writer trying to inspire new ideas by stranding his real-life lovers in overlapping fantasies and dreams until reality itself begins to dissolve; a satirical punk-DIY essay film with an acid tongue using ancient blues music to attack the national hysteria around the king’s coronation; parallel Pierrot puppets; a Bill Forsyth-esque comedy showing an alienated young night security guard trying to make friends wherever he can; a striking Daido Moriyama & Bresson-inspired hard-hitting drama exploring a woman’s late-night journey home through a London hellscape; a beautiful juxtaposition of adolescents hesitating before their first love and an elderly couple reflecting on loss and continuity on a beach in Normandy; a poetic reflection on the distance between an immigrant's life in his homeland and life in England with images worthy of Hou; a vision of UFOs and fairies on a town common; a retelling of Adam and Eve shot through with the sexual politics of modern Italy; a scathing mockumentary on a day in the life of a dishevelled Tory MP trying to get in on the right-wing podcast circuit; a hilarious take on the forms and history of cheap pulp cinema from a Finnish perspective and a vision of a no-budget film-maker driving himself insane trying to make a short film in his own back garden.

This is exactly what we love!

Our previous events have been sell-outs, with an audience comprised of the general public, fellow film-makers and industry professionals.

We're looking to fill a programme running to just under three hours.

All submission costs go towards helping us to keep this festival running. We keep our submission fees as low as possible to help keep our events accessible to all.

We want to establish an independent network of our own that values cinema and creativity, outside of the corporatised events that have come to dominate the scene.
With this event, you are buying into cinema culture, which means having an atmosphere to be part of, a space to hang out, your own place in London and a medium that can often be isolating and exclusive.

We are named in honour of Jacques Rivette’s opus ‘Out 1’. Rivette scrawled the Biblically-derived message ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (‘do not touch me’ in Latin) across 13-hours worth of film canisters to indicate he did not want the work cut further; this instruction is sometimes included now as the film’s subtitle. We hope to carry forward his uncompromising but generous spirit.

We are not looking for:

- Visual Art pieces without a clear, personal perspective

- Films with gratuitous graphic sexual assault or violence (if your film includes sexually violent or violent imagery, but is still a fully-realised piece, please just add a content warning on your submission).

- Loose projects that aren't fully conceptualised