Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
SIFFA, the So Independent International Film Festival & Awards, is coming back to London this November for its 16th edition. The organisers announced the return on 1 August, promising competitive selections for features, documentaries and shorts, masterclasses and industry talks, special screenings and an awards ceremony. Full dates, venue and programme, they say, will follow on the festival’s website in the coming months.
This year’s edition also brings something new: a filmmaking challenge marking 135 years since the birth of Sergei Prokofiev, with the selected short films to be screened in a dedicated session during the festival.
Planning your visit
When: November 2026. The festival website currently lists the dates as “to be confirmed”. In recent social-media posts the organisers give 19–22 November.
Where: London. The website lists the venue as “to be confirmed”; the organisers’ recent posts name Vue Piccadilly, 19 Lower Regent Street, London SW1Y 4LR, which was also the festival’s main cinema in 2025.
Tickets: not yet on sale on the website (“Tickets coming soon!”). According to the organisers’ posts, tickets will be available on Eventbrite from 15 October.
For filmmakers: the SIFFA 2026 page on the website still invites submissions via FilmFreeway, while a festival post of 19 September announced that submissions had closed and that the Official Selection will be announced in early November. If you have a film in the running, or hoped to enter, the festival team is the best place to check.
Jury and theme: the organisers say this year’s theme is “Fragile World, Unbroken Voices”. The International Jury has already begun viewing films, and its members will be introduced once the winners have been decided.
The Prokofiev Challenge
The challenge, announced on the festival website on 17 July, asked filmmakers around the world to choose a single passage of Prokofiev’s music, “more than two but less than three minutes long”, and make a short film with that passage as its soundtrack. There was no script to follow and no genre restriction. Entrants could shoot their own footage, work with copyright-free material, artwork, drama or animation, alone or as a team. AI-generated sequences were allowed, provided they “must not make up more than 20% of the overall film”.
Entries closed on 10 September. Selected films will be shown at SIFFA 2026 in London, in a session of their own, followed by an international online session with the participating filmmakers.
The composer is a natural subject for the festival. In November 2025 SIFFA opened its anniversary edition with a masterclass at Raindance Studios, “The Sun of Sergei Prokofiev: How to Film a Great Composer”, led by the investigative documentary-maker Richard Belfield. It closed with a private concert by Gabriel Prokofiev, the composer’s grandson, a composer, pianist and producer and the founder of Prokofiev Studio.
Among the entries is the author’s own short film, Supertri – Body or Mind, made around the Supertri triathlon series and set to music by Gabriel Prokofiev. Which films will be shown at the festival is yet to be announced.
A decade of the festival
SIFFA was founded in 2016 by Luba Balagova-Kandour, a poet, screenwriter and producer, together with her late husband, the film director Mohy Quandour. The 2024 edition, the 14th, ran in London from 18 to 24 November; the 2025 edition was both the 15th and the festival’s tenth anniversary. One of the festival’s awards, for a youth-focused film, now carries Mohy Kandour’s name.
The festival has also become a place to honour established names. The director Martha Fiennes was its Guest of Honour in 2023, and in 2025 she received a special IRIDA statuette for her contribution to world cinema; her films include Onegin.
How 2025 went
The anniversary edition ran from 20 to 28 November 2025 at Vue Cinema Piccadilly, under the banner “Cinema of Higher Values: Beyond Differences, Towards Dialogue”, inspired by the Chilean philosopher Dario Salas Sommer, and closed with an Awards Gala in Mayfair.
The festival selected 39 films from 430 submissions, from countries including Belarus, Bulgaria, China, France, India, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Uzbekistan. Twenty-eight films competed in three categories (11 features, five documentaries and 12 shorts), and ten more were screened out of competition. Best Feature Film went to The Postman, directed by Andrey Razenkov; Best Documentary to Taymetov: The Forgotten Hero (Uzbekistan), directed by Eldar Yuldashev; and Best Short Film to The Interval (Belarus), directed by Kirill Khaletsky. Around the screenings there was a press conference at The Castle Cinema in Hackney and an industry talk, led by the filmmaker Joel Van Der Molen, on how independent films find their audience.
The IRIDA statuette
SIFFA’s top honour is the IRIDA Golden Statuette. Named after Iris, the messenger of the gods in Greek myth, it is described by the festival as a symbol of “cinema’s power to connect, share stories and promote peace across cultures”. The organisers describe SIFFA as an apolitical festival whose curatorial focus is on dialogue between cultures.
What comes next
Dates, venue, jury and the Official Selection are all due to be announced in the coming weeks, with the selection expected in early November. We will update this preview as soon as the festival confirms the details.
