We will be announcing the full programme for SFF 2025 at the end of August. In the meantime, we are excited to announce that we will be joined on both days of the festival by filmmaking legend John Smith, who is this year’s Artist in Focus.

Tickets are now on sale for early bookings. You can book for either the whole weekend, a single day or for the online showcase.

Artist in Focus: John Smith

We are thrilled that pioneering artist filmmaker John Smith will be joining us on both days of the festival. John is one of Britain’s best known and most influential avant-garde filmmakers and has been described as “One of the UK’s most enduringly important moving-image artists” (Erika Balsom, ‘Best of 2022’, Artforum), and as “My favorite British film maker” by Jarvis Cocker. John’s films blend humour, political engagement and formal invention to make works on the politics of how we see the world. They open space for imagining different ways of seeing and thinking and consistently challenge the presentation of truth in the constructed worlds of films and images.

John was born in Walthamstow, moving to Leytonstone in the early 1980s, and the area has been the setting for many of his best known works including The Black Tower, Blight and Home Suite. This connection to the social history of our festival’s adopted neighbourhood has informed the two events that we will be holding with John over the weekend.

We are also thrilled to be joined by John Rogers, another local lad and psychic cartographer of North East London. John Rogers will host the Q&A after Saturday’s screening of Home Suite and will facilitate a guided walk of Leytonstone on Sunday, where we will visit important sites from John Smith’s films and gain insight into Leytonstone’s social history. John Rogers is a filmmaker and author of several books on London including Welcome to New London - journeys and encounters in the post-Olympic city and This Other London - adventures in the overlooked city.

Saturday 20th September

Home Suite + in conversation with John Smith and John Rogers

John Smith takes us on a real time tour of the home from which he is being evicted, to make way for the building of the M11 link road. In the style of TV shows like Through The Keyhole that took viewers inside the homes of the great and good, John shows us his dilapidated home with great pride, chronicling the history of the everyday items he has lived with and bringing them back to life. Discussions of bathroom tiles and an attempt to understand why there are so many toothbrushes in a house with only one occupant shift into poignant reminiscences on the people he has shared this space with. The mundane and the profound jostle for centre stage throughout on a backdrop of political drama.

Sunday 21st September

Walking Tour With John Smith and John Rogers

In the early 1980s the ACME Housing Association started providing live / work spaces in Leytonstone for artists, in condemned houses that had been compulsorily purchased by the Department of Transport in preparation for the building of the M11 Link Road. In 1982, John Smith was one of the first artists to move into one of these houses, having been told that he could expect to benefit from the very cheap rent for two or three years, after which time his house would be demolished.  But vigorous opposition to the road, first through legal challenges and later through direct action, held back the work for many years, until John was eventually evicted from his home in 1994. On this walk he will talk about his diverse experiences over 12 years in an area that temporarily housed the largest concentration of artists in Europe. During this period John made some of his best-known works, including The Black Tower, Home Suite and Blight, the locations of which will be visited en route.

“When I moved to Leytonstone 19 years ago I realised that my decision to move here had been massively influenced by the landscapes of the filmmaker John Smith who I had been obsessively watching and re-watching for around five years. John’s film the Black Tower had occupied my psyche like the unseen protagonist of the film. This led me to write an article that year for the Journal of East London studies about the cinematic topographies of North East London and I have been exploring this landscape ever since creating my own works delving into the incredible landscape of Leytonstone and it’s hinterland.” - John Rogers