Screen Academy Scotland shorts – Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026

 5 Stars

Screen Academy Scotland has been educating the next generation of Scottish filmmakers for 20 years. For many of the Academy’s directors featured at EIFF this year, it was their first time working with full production crews and an infrastructure to help bring their ideas to life. As with any Fringe performance sometimes it can be risky to see untested talent, but for the Screen Academy Scotland shorts the quality definitely shows through.

The standout films this year both nearly brought me to tears. Abuela is an intimate and beautifully composed documentary about director Monica Echevarria’s grandmother, who was a poet and independent journalist during the Franco regime in Spain. And Isaac Sparks’ User tells a story about a dystopian future, where a man is hired to electronically transfer his consciousness into a teenage boy’s body in order to help him commit suicide. The film doesn’t overuse special effects and makes incredible use of a literal ticking clock in the bottom corner of the frame.

Not every film is narrative in the conventional sense. Bergamot, directed by Laleh Ajampour, is more of a tone poem painted in black and white, urban videography overlayed with the subtle narration of a woman speaking Farsi. Ñuuyii (Earth), by Itandehui Jansen, tells the story of an astronaut rediscovering Earth thousands of years in the future, but what results on screen is more of a mysterious composition of images distorted on purpose in order to make a familiar world unrecognisable.

A common theme throughout this year’s films seems to be that of death and moving on from grief. Horizons, directed by Rachel Mclean, is a life-affirming piece that looks at a relationship between a vivacious but elderly grandmother and a mother who remains focused on her absent daughter and terminally ill father.

Skerry & May (main image), by Paul Gray, makes a case for AI consciousness when a woman creates a model of her deceased partner. And Passing Place, by Hamza Bin Tahir, entertained everyone with its depiction of a hilariously bureaucratic afterlife. Despite the dark themes portrayed by some of the artists, the future of Scottish filmmaking looks bright in the hands of Screen Academy Scotland.

 Screen Academy Scotland Shorts at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2026