The 11th annual SIFFA Film Festival rolls out her red carpet in London next week with the headline theme “Fragile World, Unbroken Voices”.
“Our Festival is designed to honour how fleetingly we all live on our planet, and yet how profoundly and powerfully we hold our ties and our memories to Her, especially emotionally,” said SIFFA Founder Madame Luba Balagova, a Poetess, originally from the Circassian Caucasus by the Black Sea, now based in the UK.
Running over 4 days, the festival will screen 22 movies, covering full-length features, shorts, and documentaries.
The show will be based at The Vue multi-screen complex in Regent Street, Piccadilly, between 19 – 22 November, and the entire programme can be seen at: siffafestival.co.uk.
SIFFA’26 stages her traditional glittering red carpet Opening Night on 19 November, featuring movie star guests and speakers. The opening night Gala Screening is a rarely seen UK classic – Franklin J. Schaffner’s ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’.
The closing film will be Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Mirror’.
Art That Stays with Us
Documentary highlights include Anatoly Balchev’s Chemiakine. A film spanning 36 years…. the length of the film-making process itself suggests the unusual depth of attention to an artist: an opportunity to see a person across time, beyond a single event, period or public image.
Alongside it are Joel Van der Molen’s Gipsy Kings, exploring the musical world of Gipsy Kings and Tonino Baliardo, and Galina Evtushenko’s Two Days in Yasnaya Polyana. Together, these films invite reflection on how art travels across time and borders, how connections to cultural roots endure, and why another culture can become part of our own inner world.
The Many Languages of Fiction
The British film Ben Etchells’ The Knight, the Wizard, the Giant and the Morrigan is among the highlights of the fiction competition. Its screening will be accompanied by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
Also deserving particular attention is Said Tolgurov’s In the Mountains. He, the story of two archivists searching for the last person who can sing an ancient Kabardian song. The search for a voice becomes a search for living memory — something that can still be heard, but whose survival can no longer be taken for granted.
The fiction programme also includes Ahmet Alim Yilmaz’s A Swallow’s Journey, South Korean film-maker Younguee Yoo’s A Vast Algorithm of Humanity: The Movie, Maria Kravchenko’s Big Wave and Aleksey Alferov’s The Little Karateka. Their presence together offers audiences encounters with different artistic perspectives, film-making traditions and generations of filmmakers.
Short Films and Films Yet to Come
Short film-making demands particular precision: creating a world in a matter of minutes, allowing an audience to feel another person’s life, and leaving a question that remains after the credits. Programme highlights include Siyu Chen’s Reverie of the Dreamt and Larisa Sirmbarde’s Almost Impossible.
An international jury will assess work across four competition categories: fiction features, documentaries, short films and screenplays. The new screenplay competition allows the festival to support an author’s voice before there is a crew, a budget or a completed film.
The Right to Hear One Another
“Perhaps never in SIFFA’s history have circumstances tested us so severely. Today, we have to defend both the possibility of holding the festival and its right to remain true to its own artistic judgement. Behind every entry in the programme are decisions the audience never sees, and efforts we rarely speak about.
“A person cannot be defined solely by the political circumstances of their country or of the wider world. Within each person live humanity and spirituality. And that spirituality encompasses language, the memory of family and ancestry, the experience of loss and survival, and love, ultimately. An entire culture takes on that person’s face and voice.
“What lies behind the words ‘Fragile World, Unbroken Voices’? People, with their lives and inner worlds, of which we may know almost nothing. Cinema allows us to draw closer to those lives. If we stop looking closely and listening to one another, the world will become more vulnerable still. I am drawing on every last reserve of strength to preserve the possibility of such an encounter,” says Luba Balagova Kandour, Founder and President of SIFFA.
“In a concert programme, contemporary composers share the stage with the classics — both celebrated works and those that are unjustly seldom performed. I feel the same approach belongs in cinema. A work’s fame does not always reflect its artistic worth, and a film’s age tells us nothing about its ability to move an audience today. Bringing classics and new auteur cinema together allows us to see both afresh,” says Luba Balagova Kandour.
For SIFFA, re-visiting the classics is part of the same exploration as presenting premieres: each new historical moment changes our perspective, revealing something previously unseen in a familiar film.
SIFFA 2026 — Fragile World, Unbroken Voices
19–22 November 2026
Vue Piccadilly, 19 Lower Regent Street, London SW1Y 4LR
Programme and tickets: siffafestival.co.uk and Eventbrite.