Glasgow Short Film Festival — A–Z of films

All Light, Everywhere examines the microscopic and vertiginous in equal, beguiling measure.

From the colonial to the occupying, this is wide ranging as an exploration of something fundamental to cinema.

It's one where the camera less becomes a fly on the wall than a sleeping dog in front of the fireplace, one where the comfort of the subjects gives us a better insight into them.

Emotions here are betrayed by the twitch of a knife, a violent dream, an envelope crumpled in a hand or a long toke on a cigarette.

This is meditative, melancholy, moving.

At every interaction the possibility of gleam is replaced with the certainty of grime.

This is heartbreaking.

This is a simple tale, simply done, but strong for it.

It is a fascinating piece, beautifully constructed and observed.

It's in the messy business of definition that the film starts to explore where things end and things begin.

Fireflies is abstract, potentially uncomfortable, even intermittently visceral.

Caitlin McMullan's film is a delight.

Vincent Villa's sound means we can hear the water even when we cannot see it, feel it when we can do both.

Razan Madhoon's film is a gut-punch, a wrenching.

It takes a lot to make this kind of document. The simplest line is often the hardest.

Though it is constructed about a ruin this is an unburied treasure, not a folly.

An act of scholarship, contrast.

Pajek's animation is striking, pencilled lines and negative spaces creating something distinctive and delightful.

There's a whole set of semiotics, tracksuits and jackets, Berghaus and Buckfast.

The recursively unreal spaces are an environment produced by external constraints.

It is not just in vision that there is quality.

At under six minutes Kartal's piece can only gloss over what amount to highlights.

Breathing life and spirit into the undead.

A bewitching thing.

It is a film made hard to read, hard to endure.

This is striking, innovative, affecting.

This is something inevitably personal.

Rooted in almost deliberately archaic choices like pixel fonts and static, Sebastian Mulder's film is a stunning piece of documentary.

There are so many moments of beauty in this that it amounts to a gallery, a gathering.

Something unco good in mixing the dread and the drouthy.

From the smallest bit of set and stance comes posture, posterity the goal of this endeavour.

There are layers of colonial consequence to these spaces, their gardens dominated by stepped approaches and the borrowed architecture of imagined pasts.

Stephanie Roland's film exists in a space between spaces, a liminal latitude, languorous longitude, a tropic of candour.

Jorge Quintela's cinematography finds grandeur in what could be grime.

For all its universalities, this is something rooted in the very particular terroir of American further education.

Another showcase for Ferguson's technique, his very distinctive eye.

Sander Joon's film is an absolute delight. There is not a character or element whose design does not feel both fitting and funny.

Not just unbalanced tonally, it is consistent with itself. It is a thing to enjoy, to allow to wash over you

The transition from outsider to insider, the uneasy space between protagonist, antagonist, even the chemistry with the other girls singly and collectively all speak to a delicacy that reflects the script.

Everywhere ghosts, not just of motion, blur, of building, concrete carcass and serried stairs untroubled by the feet that no longer walk upon them.

The charm of this piece is bound up in its melancholic energy, a eulogy where many of the lines were drawn by the lost.

This is intertext, existing in a twilight zone where the benefit of 25 years of distance and the loss of colour gives it the cast of something at least as old again.

Ruaridh Mollica and Joshua Griffin produce astonishing performances.

This is a story that is at once deeply personal and indicative of changing attitudes.

The line between horror and humour is at least as thin as that veil between the worlds, and crossing it can bring all sorts of things back. This is one of them.

Morag McKinnon's script is loosely off its head, part hilarity, part nonsensical innovation.

Weans in hi-viz and high excitement, running and playing and shouting and learning. It is a delight to watch them at play.

Mo Harawe's film is stunning.