Sci-fi London gets under way

25 features and 51 shorts feature in festival.

by Amber Wilkinson

The Rizen will close the festival
The Rizen will close the festival
The Sci-fi London film festival kicked off last night with the UK premiere of Caught. The festival, which runs until May 6, will showcase 25 features, 51 shorts and four VR shorts alongside events including the 48 Hour Film Challenge and dog cosplay event Sci-Fido. The festival will close with the world premiere of The Rizen, directed by Matt Mitchell and Taliesyn Mitchell.

In addition to new films in the line-up, the festival has also partnered with the Science Museum for a double-bill focusing on robots and artificial intelligence, with A This year we’ve teamed up with the Science Museum and their fantastic blockbuster Robots exhibition, to present a movie double-bill focusing on the world of artificial intelligence with A.I. and Ex Machina.

Other events include a Science fiction screenwriting workshop with Darren Rapier and the festival's Louis Sav.

Among the films screening are monster-in-the woods tale Flora, Sasha Louis Vukovic, which will have its world premiere and Chinese film The End Of The Lonely Island, directed by Ren Chao Wang, that tells the story of a starship that is the last hope for civilisation.

The full feature line-up is as follows:

  • Caught (dir Jamie Patterson) - a pair of journalists face a fight for survival, after invited a strange couple into their home
  • Space Detective (dir Antonio Llapur) - An exiled space detective returns to help an old flame but finds himself tangled in a web of interstellar intrigue, galactic gangsters, and a sinister scheme that threatens the very fate of the entire galaxy.
  • Sublimate (dir Roger Armstrong, John Hickman) - A drug-addled techno producer invents a device that 'sends consciousness to the next level'. When experiments go horrifically wrong he takes extreme measures to find more 'volunteers'.
  • Domain (dir Nathaniel Atcheson) - After a deadly virus wipes out most of humanity, the survivors are forced to wait in self-sustaining bunkers with a networked video interface for communication, but one by one, they start mysteriously disappearing.
  • The Fitzroy (dir Andrew Harmer) - Comedy set in a post-Apocalyptic 1950s about the last refuge for a seaside holiday.
  • Diverge (dir James Morrison) - In the aftermath of a global pandemic, a survivor searches for ways to cure his wife of a deadly virus.
  • Flora (dir Sasha Louis Vukovic) - In 1929, an expedition of university botanists enter an uncharted forest where they discover, and must escape an ancient organism.
  • Unspeakable Horrors: The Plan 9 Conspiracy (dir Jose Prendes) - Documentary about the much-maligned Ed Wood film.
  • The End Of The Lonely Island (dir Ren Chao Wang) - Can a lonely scientist save the world from extinction?
  • The Girl With All The Gifts (dir Colm McCarthy) - A scientist and a child make a bid for survival in a world of zombies.
  • Virtual Revolution (dir Guy-Roger Duvert) - A private investigator goes on the hunt for hackers who killed his girlfriend.
  • Love And Saucers (dir Brad Abrahams) - Documentary about an artist who claims to have had a lifetime of encounters with aliens.
  • Magellan (dir Rob York) - An astronaut is sent on a solo mission to investigate the source of some mysterious signals.
  • Yesterday Last Year (dir Jeff Hanley) - A love triangle is complicated by a time travel machine.
  • Immigration Game (dir Krystof Zlatnik) - Hunters track down refugees as part of a TV game show in order to stop them gaining citizenship.
  • The Gatehouse (dir Martin Gooch) - When a 10-year-old digs up something she shouldn't in an old woodland, she finds herself in a battle with a ancient force.
  • The Last Scout (dir Simon Phillips) - It’s 2065 and Earth is rendered uninhabitable by war. Humanity’s remaining survivors send a fleet of ships to different points in the galaxy in the hope of finding a new world.
  • The KAOS Brief (dir JP Mandarino) - Hacked footage reveals mysterious events surrounding the abduction of four teenagers.
  • Blue World Order (dir Ché Baker, Dallas Bland) - A man must rescue the only child left on the planet after an electromagnetic pulse kills the rest.
  • A.I. (dir Steven Spielberg) - Scientists create a robot boy, with emotions, in a globally warmed, flooded future world. Showing as a double-bill with Ex Machina (dir Alex Garland) - A programmer goes on retreat to his boss' hideaway and is asked to help evaluate an artificial intelligence android.
  • Neil Stryker And The Tyrant Of Time (dir Rob Taylor) - Stryker must now race through time and do battle with goblins, robots, and ten-foot killer penguins in order to save the world and rescue his son from the clutches of his infamous former mentor.
  • Anti Matter (dir Keir Burrows) - A science fiction take on the Alice In Wonderland story.
  • The Rizen (dir Matt Mitchell) - The year is 1955. NATO and the Allied Forces have been conducting secret experiments in a bid to win the Arms Race. Now they have finally succeeded but what the Army has unleashed threatens to tear our world apart.
  • For the full line up and ticket details visit the official site

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