The Fashion in Film Festival
Fashion in Film Festival returns to independent cinemas across the UK with landmark environmental film showcase.
The Fashion in Film Festival, a non-profit arts organisation based at UAL Central Saint Martins, is returning with its BFI-backed 2025 edition GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – a landmark programme that uses cinema to explore the complex relationship between fashion and nature, and raise awareness of the nuanced ecological crises that we are facing as a society.
Spanning the early 20th century to present day, the programme examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. With over 30 titles across a diverse range of film forms — documentary, fiction, artist and experimental cinema, early cinema and fashion film — GROUNDED presents diverse narratives addressing ecological and geopolitical concerns while exploring imaginative spaces of poetry, comedy, beauty, joy, horror, and transgression.
The festival’s UK-wide leg will take place at the following iconic independent arts venues from September 5 -25 October: Watershed Bristol, Arnolfini Bristol, Exeter Phoenix, Plymouth Arts Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts (in partnership with V&A Dundee), Eden Court Inverness, Glasgow Film Theatre, Garnet Hill Multicultural Centre. The festival will also collaborate with V&A Dundee on their Garden Futures: Designing with Nature exhibition.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Sacred Transmission, explores the presence of gods and spirits inhabiting the natural world, via films from Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and Spanish filmmaker Rocío Mesa.
- Ready-to-wear Landscapes, In partnership with TRASH CLUB’s founder Matthew Needham, this programme zooms in on the term ‘waste colonialism’ and reveals the ways in which creativity can be deployed to amplify collective concerns.
Cartographies of Memory, a showcase from multidisciplinary Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. - Kosai Sekine’s Dust to Dust (2023), tracks the lifecycle of fabric from the landfills of Kenya to Parisian runways.
We Are All Chimeras, a shorts programme and talk from Central Saint Martin’s Senior Lecturer Margarita Louca, exploring nonhuman or hybrid states. - Jodie Mack’s The Grand Bizarre (2018), the first feature-length film from experimental filmmaker celebrated for her vibrant, handmade 16mm films that blend stop-motion, collage and abstract animation.
FULL PROGRAMME AVAILABLE HERE