KONTEKST Film Festival is an annual event that aims to platform emerging filmmakers and artists, contributing to discussions around visual anthropology and experimental cinema.

The festival works to disrupt academic exclusivity by communicating critical knowledge through artistic practice. It challenges institutional authority in favour of more horizontal, anti-expert modes of knowledge exchange, platforming artists without established exhibition histories and foregrounding conversation, feedback, and collective reflection as integral to the programme.

KFF 2026: ENTANGLEMENTS is a grassroots festival of ethnographic and experimental film, art and thought, exploring the ethics of encounters among humans, non-humans, and their environments.

We’re looking for work that shows how humans, animals, plants, technology, and material culture shape and impact each other in entangled and unexpected ways. If your work plays with ideas of kinship beyond the human, questions our assumptions about nature, or reveals the hidden relationships between life and technology, we’d love to see it! 

ENTANGLEMENTS tells many stories: stories of fluid boundaries between species, shifting and blurring as they move through the world, making and unmaking each other, transforming and becoming their environments. Bring us your work that investigates these connections, challenging conventional thinking mechanisms about our place in the world.

We especially want to be able to have conversations around the ethical, aesthetic and philosophical implications of these entanglements: 

• What does it mean to attempt to translate the experience of other species? 

• What  responsibilities do we have towards each other? 

• How can we interrogate anthropocentric taxonomies and violent binaries? 

• And most importantly, how can we use film as a medium for stretching and expanding towards a perspective that goes beyond the human?

Here are some keywords that can be helpful to think with: 

entanglement, ecology, kinning, antispeciesism, vegetal agency, techno-animism,  ecosemiotics, relational ethics, co-presence, postspecies worldmaking, more-than-human worlds, interconnectedness, ethical coexistence, shared futures, post-humanism.

The 3rd edition of the festival will take place on the 25th and 26th of July, 2026 at Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL London.

Since one of the key reasons why we are organising the festival is to create situations where the dialogue between the artists and audiences can happen, we hope to have most of the successfully selected artists present at the festival.

Our festival venue will include a large film screening hall, a medium sized room for interactive activities and talks, and a smaller room with an exhibition space where we will be able to set up artworks for the audience to engage with throughout the event.

We are looking for submissions in a diversity of forms, and we especially value work that goes beyond genre conventions and challenges expectations. 

Though we are primarily an anthropology film festival, we are flexible in the genres we accept. This means that your film does not have to stick to non-fiction: we welcome the blurring of boundaries between documenting, imagining, speculating and creating. We want to see films that deal with social and ecological issues in original and critical ways, and are interested not only in what your film shows but in what it  does  – how it was made,  what impact it seeks to create,  and the context it emerges from and speaks to. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the genres that we typically showcase: documentaries, ethnographic films, expanded cinema, autobiographical work, video-essay, experiential approaches, ethno-fiction, and even speculative fiction. 

Apart from short films, we welcome ideas on how we can activate the festival space to make the audience connect with this year's theme through not just words but also senses. We encourage you to submit your proposals for: talks, workshops, panels, conversations, performances, tours, art installations (image / sound / sculpture / mixed media) and their activations & other mediums that we haven’t thought of yet. We hope to be proved that learning can happen not just through textual means.

Please note: If your film would benefit from a technical organisation that goes beyond the traditional cinema-setup  we encourage you to submit it as an installation rather than a film submission. 

To be included in the selection for this year’s festival edition,

1. You:

   • Must be an emerging / early-career artist / maker / researcher. We will prioritise platforming those with little to no previous experience in exhibiting their work so if you are a fairly established artist, filmmaker or a production company, we encourage you to skip this open call - but by all means, please join us at the event itself - we’d love to have you participate in discussions and connect with up-and-coming creators.

2. Your film submission:

   • Must not exceed the runtime of 25 minutes.

   • Must have been directed/produced by emerging filmmakers at the early stages of their career.

   • Must not have been shown previously at major festivals or received awards. Screenings at community events, or for example university graduation shows are okay – please make sure you list the screening history when you submit your work.

   • Must have English subtitles (regardless whether your dialogue is in English or another language) – unless adding subtitles goes against the creative intention then leave a note. Many of our film reviewers are not English natives and we want to ensure that the films are accessible to everyone.

   • Must not rely on AI generated content. At the same time, we welcome films that engage with the subject of AI-human interactions in a self-aware, contextual and environmentally-conscious manner. 

   • Will be automatically rejected if it promotes views or actions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist, casteist, ageist, + and aimed to generate hatred towards marginalised communities 

3. Your artworks, installations, workshops and other activations proposals:

   • Must have been produced and proposed by emerging artists at the early stages of their career.

   • Must not have been shown previously at major exhibitions or showcases. Please make sure you list the exhibition history when you submit your work.

   • Activities: Should ideally fit within a 1-hour time slot (including 15min setup/pack-down time). We may be able to host activities longer than 1h but only on the condition that these are durational and let people drop in and out freely (but we still recommend proposing them not longer than 2-3h max so that we can accommodate other artists).

   • Installations and artworks: These can be exhibited throughout the festival duration.

   • Must not rely on AI generated content. At the same time, we welcome films that engage with the subject of AI-human interactions in a self-aware, contextual and environmentally-conscious manner. 

   • Will be automatically rejected if it promotes views or actions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist, casteist, ageist, + and aimed to generate hatred towards marginalised communities

We have two submission forms: one for films, another one for everything else:

1. Films:
   Film submissions are processed through FilmFreeway.
   Open call opens at13:00 on the 17th of February 2026, and closes at 23:59 on the 15th of March 2026.
   
   

2. Artworks, installations, workshops and other activations proposals:
   Submissions for this type of work are done via a Google Form.
   Open call opens at 13:00 on the 17th of February 2026, and closes at 23:59 on the 15th of March 2026. 

You are welcome to send more than one submission if you have the work that you think fits the theme.

Review Process

Films are reviewed by a diverse panel of reviewers composed of artists, filmmakers, researchers, and curators with expertise in more-than-human perspectives and interdisciplinary practices. Reviewers will not have access to applicants’ personal information during initial assessment.

You understand that, upon submitting your film to the festival, you authorise us to share your film with our review committee.

Review criteria will focus on conceptual clarity, originality, and how the work engages with the program’s themes — particularly its attention to relationality, non-human collaboration, and approaches that challenge anthropocentric or colonial frameworks. 

Selection Process

After being reviewed by the committee, the films are selected by the KONTEKST programming team based on those reviews. While we value the input that each filmmaker puts into their work, the final selection will not depend on the films’ aesthetic quality or production value but rather its critical approach and concept.

Selection Notification

We hope to finalise the selection over the course of May but we reserve the right for the successful filmmakers to be notified by the 14th of June 2026. Filmmakers then have 7 days to accept selection upon being notified. Unsuccessful entries will be notified by the 25th of June 2026.

Review & Selection Process

Artworks, installations, workshops and other activation proposals (such as performances) are reviewed separately from films and go straight to KONTEKST’s programming team who will review each of the applications as these are received and reach out to the artist for further information or comment if needed. These follow-ups will be done either via email or video call with the artist.

Selection Process

We hope to finalise the selection over the course of May but we reserve the right for the successful artists to be notified by the 14th of June 2026. Artists then have 7 days to accept selection upon being notified. Successful artists will be invited for the follow-up call with the members of the programming and production teams to talk through the practical aspects of the proposed activity. Unsuccessful entries will be notified by the 25th of June 2026.

Upon accepting to have your film screened at KFF 2026 you automatically authorise us to use your film in promotional materials such as festival brochures and trailers. If however there are specific parts of a film that cannot be shown publicly we will of course respect that, kindly let us know this right away. 

Our goal is to support you throughout the film festival -  the visitors of our event will receive anonymous feedback forms so you should get plenty of insight on how your work is received, as well as potential new ideas for development. 

After the festival takes place, we will stay in touch with you and invite you for the artists’ debrief workshop where we will connect with everyone who we platformed and exchange thoughts on how the event went. Many of our featured artists end up making great connections at our events and often work together on other projects after they are featured with us – we hope that the event can benefit you too in this way!

We will give you an option to have your work featured in our open-access online archive to further boost its reach and social impact and you will also be able to have a spotlight page on our website if you’d like to.

As an open collective, we welcome those who submit their work to consider whether they would like to join us - for more information on who we are, please see our manifesto.