SLUICE FILM

Sluice Film Festival - SFF launches in Seyðisfjörður 2025

The first Sluice Film Festival will launch during the Sluice Seyðisfjörður Expo 23rd -25th May, in eastern Iceland at the Herðubíó cinema and will be the key space for artists working with film and video to engage with the theme of the 2025 event: World Building. The theme of the 2025 Sluice Film Festival (and Expo) looks to the creation of other, speculative-until-summoned worlds. These worlds are a chimera, falling apart just as easily as they fall together. 

Located at the head of a fjord on the far side of the remote island nation of Iceland in the harsh North Atlantic Ocean, often cut off from outside supply routes – the town of Seyðisfjörður is only accessible via the Fjarðarheiði mountain pass or the weekly (summer months) ferry arrival. In a country whose geology and climate seem to actively reject human colonisation, the theme is a jumping-off point to explore our relationship with the world, and the stories we tell ourselves about our place within it. 

Launching Sluice Film Festival allows us to focus this specialised strand of programming on artists working with the moving image. We are looking to Sluice Film as a new initiative to deliver new locations, audiences and stages for artists engaging with the moving image. 

About the Festival Directors
Karl England is an artist, curator and organiser. His expanded practice lays bare a particular focus on the conceptualisation and methodologies of artist and curator-led organisation as a form of creative practice. Karl organises large-scale events and publishes under the moniker Sluice. Sluice was founded by Karl and the art historian Ben Street in 2011 and works exclusively with artist and curator-led projects and non-profit galleries. Sluice typically works with 20-30 projects at a time to realise ambitious multi-venue events in different cities around the world (London 2011, 2013, 2015 2017, New York 2014, 2016, Berlin 2018, Odense 2019, Lisbon 2022, Colchester 2024). Karl sometimes exhibits in a gallery context but mostly exists in these other modes of production.

Sarah Wishart is an artist and film-maker based in Glasgow with a particular interest in co-production processes in documentary film making. She is currently working on a film project supported by the Royal Scottish Academy. She has been Chair of Offline, a charity focussed on the development of artists working in moving image since 2024. She has had film projects shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, British Animation Film Festival, the Montreal International Animation Festival and been a semi finalist in the New York Animation Festival and the Kathmandu International. She has worked with Karl England and Sluice since 2018 and featured as guest editor on the magazine in 2019. She has exhibited in Sluice spaces and at the Colchester Expo in 2024.