Leeds Screendance Competition

Each year the Coney Island Polar Bear Club organizes a well-attended New Year’s Day Plunge. When the filmmaker arrives at the scene, the plungers have already left. What remains are Coney Island Dances.

Bettine Josties | | | 3 mins | World Premiere

The corners, slopes, dead ends, and curves of Tallinn Cruise Terminal nudges us to ponder the dilemmas of the achievement society. YES! questions whether we should we push ourselves into a box or dare to be wrong.

Madli Lääne | Estonia | 2024 | 3 mins | International Premiere

Shot entirely underwater, Bakelite is a live-action short depicting the paradoxical relationship with plastic in our throwaway society. This aquatic ballet is an ecological tale of a perilous battle against marine pollution with a hopeful conclusion.

Julie Gautier | France | 2024 | 6 mins | UK Premiere

Filmed at inner city locations in Leeds including Holbeck and Chapeltown, to bend and not break uses movement as an excavation, flowing between states of grief and joy to celebrate the role of dance as a communal healing force.

Dan Canham | United Kingdom | 2024 | 11 mins | No Premiere

A woman loses herself in an exhilarating tango that transforms her. The dancing ink of Loca is both an homage to the tango of Argentina and an invitation to heed our intuition, our natural movement.

Véronique Paquette | Canada | 2024 | 5 mins | UK Premiere

Channelling the spirit of those whose land we walk, create and dance on Devouring Stones Up Close is a non-linear dance film that offers us a visually poetic, abstract expression of personal and shared rage.

Cat Rider & Zap Mcconnell | United States | 2023 | 9 mins | UK Premiere

Intriguing and mesmerising This Madness of Loving employs effective animation techniques and engaging sound design to take us on an existential excursion from matter to light.

Rola Shamas | Lebanon | 2024 | 6 mins | World Premiere

A breathtaking flamenco dancer tries to navigate a world of constant gazes, trying to adjust, and live up to the way the world sees her. Cut is a unique dance film simultaneously shot on Super 8, Super 16, 35mm and 65mm analog film.

Jesper Tønnes | Denmark | 2023 | 5 mins | UK Premiere

One dancer, one body, one phone. In a time of collective alienation and technological mass control, Corpus and the Wandering transcends the walls of a fragmented grid system to uncover the shared humanity in each of us, and our place in the cosmos.

Jo Roy | Canada | 2024 | 7 mins | UK Premiere

A sleeping man's restless legs pull him away from his bed and into a high energy, dance-driven dream, much to his tired girlfriend's despair. Restless is a creative response to restless leg syndrome which has plagued the director for years.

Ned Champain | United Kingdom | 2023 | 3 mins | Yorkshire Premiere

By combining choreography and cinematography, Aeterna plays with distorting the human form, offering a visual representation of the existential complexity of human existence.

Hannah Goodman | | | 6 mins | World Premiere

A solo-male dancer negotiates his brutalist urban location. Where We Learn Our Worth is a visual poem about the connection between human architecture and nature.

Paula Romy | United Kingdom | 2024 | 4 mins | Yorkshire Premiere