“Right, let’s go fill ourselves with champagne”. Last Saturday marked the closing event of the UK Film Festival. Selecting from the finest features, documentaries and short films in independent cinema, UKFF is an outlet for works that “might not … have had the chance for a prestigious public screening.” Previous highlights have included Pawel Pawlikowski’s IDA and short film THE PHONE CALL, starring Sally Hawkins – both of which went on to win Academy Awards. Who knows: some of this year’s picks may be on the same path!

The closing gala screened at London’s Framestore Preview Cinema. The winners of the 2013 and 2014 annual three-page script competition – both winners of the Crystal Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival – bookended events. MIKE, starring Lucien Collier, at first appears a simple tale of sibling quarrels. Younger brother Jack is scared to have his haircut; older brother Mike mocks his immaturity. Something, however, appears uneasy. As the afternoon passes and Jack doesn’t return, the truth becomes ever more unclear. “Look around you” says the hairdresser’s receptionist “we haven’t had a kid in all afternoon.” Jack’s absence, we discover, is more profound – a theme of bereavement that continued across many of UKFF’s award winners.

SHIPWRECK, winner of Best Documentary Short, poetically and harrowingly depicts the aftermath of a disastrous migrant voyage across the Mediterranean. Using densely populated frames and nervous, bobbing camera movements, Morgan Knibbe constructs an intimate and draining example of direct cinema. Parts cut a testament to what remains – broken, brittle ships strewn on a deserted beach and family members torn and frenzied with grief. We see workers, police and survivors crowded and colliding in the dock. Yet even more horror is evident in the poetry – one by one the coffins winched into the air, dangling above the camera, placed on another ship and trafficked out to who knows where.

Best International Short VOID finds itself in a familiar, gloomy Scandinavian setting. Lars Mikkelson’s Daniel befriends Dar Salim’s Amir on a night ferry to Bornholm. They drink then exchange stories. Daniel’s wife, supposedly on her way to them yet never arriving, is always a spectre over events. Her (non)presence proves both disturbing and tragic as the nature of this new friendship is fully revealed.

 …an almost unbearably emotionally intense picture…

On a lighter note, Cynthia Hogan’s HUMBLE PIE was winner of Best Short Animation – a neatly-packed comic tale of a bee’s plight to secure his prized pie. Best Music Video GRADES-KING provided a sweet venture inside a bored Japanese Schoolgirl’s brain. And in the Best British Short Film category BOOGALOO AND GRAHAM found even more of the feel good theme. In the heart of Troubles era Northern Ireland, brothers Jamesy and Malachy are charged to protect of a pair of chickens. Instantly seeing the fun they seek all avenues of cleaning, feeding, and indeed walking. Troubles are afoot, however, as space needs to be made for a new arrival in the family. Director Michael Lennox manages to fuse humour and drama and find the strange fantasies childhood can create in the most basic parts of life.

Best short film by far, however, came from NORTH – also featured in this year’s Cambridge Film Festival – winner of the Best Student Short Film. Charting the assisted suicide of a mother through the eyes of her son, Phil Sheerin’s picture creates an almost unbearably emotionally intense picture. Aaron’s (Barry Keoghan) unwillingness to let everything he knows leave his life is compounded by the generational divide thrust upon him by the arrival of his uncles at his mother’s final moments. There’s very little hope in NORTH – everything from lighting to editing creates a claustrophobic internal space. All we can do is accept and let the film slide away.

The UK Film Festival’s other winner’s included JERUSALEM IN LINE for Best Feature Documentary and Rick Rodger’s AMOK for Best Full Length Feature.