5 November @ 18:45 – 22:00
Date: Thursday 5 November
Time: Doors from 6:45pm | Screenings start 7.30pm prompt
Location: SET Social, 55a Nigel Road, Peckham, London, SE15 4NP
Admission: £9 general admission / £7 concessions
The opening night of SET Film Festival 2026 presents Impossible Cinema, a programme of four short films that explore the possibilities of impossible cinema.
Across these frustrated, imaginary and improvised forms, cinema emerges not as a finished object but as a site of interruption, refusal and creative ‘making-do’. In these works, encounters with borders, bureaucracy and censorship pose challenges to conventions of filmic completion, and prompt experimental improvisations using surviving or sufficient materials. Rather than treat impossibility as a failure, these films reclaim it as a productive condition: opening up new relationships between fiction and documentary, memory and performance, archive and invention.
In Maryam Tarfakory’s Razeh-del, appropriated footage from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema tells a story of censorship through two schoolgirls and their ‘synopsis for an impossible film’. Scoping footage of Helsinki at night, a NATO nuclear exercise and Finnish Eurovision lyrics combine in Jani Peltonen’s Equal Dust, while in Basma Al-sharif’s Old Masters, two protagonists wander through Gothenburg’s Museum of Art and a Gazan orange grove, contemplating the politics of image-preservation and the role of the witness in political violence. Oleksiy Radynski’s Where Russia Ends resurrects the undiscovered footage of a Soviet-era Ukrainian film expedition to Siberia, reconstructing an erased history of Russia’s imperialist wars and resource extraction, while interrogating the contemporary politics of land sovereignty and liberation.
The evening begins at 7.30pm with an introduction by Phoebe Campion, followed by the screening. Doors open at 6.45pm.
Films in the programme
Equal Dust
Jani Peltonen | 2025 | 14 minutes | Finnish
In November 1983, a camera test records a nocturnal journey through Helsinki, just as NATO’s Able Archer military exercise simulates the outbreak of nuclear war, with Finland cast as a battlefield between East and West. Blurring the line between real and imaginary, factual and counterfactual, Equal Dust transforms the haunting footage into a survey of possible destruction, drawing on a series of camp 1980s Finnish Eurovision entries as a counter-archive of Cold War public consciousness.
Razeh-del
Maryam Tafakory | 2024 | 27 minutes | Persian
Weaving fact and fabulation, Razeh-del (‘Secret of the Heart’) tells the story of Zan, the first Iranian women’s newspaper, whose brief run under the Iranian regime in the late 1990s inspires two schoolgirls to contemplate a synopsis for ‘an impossible film’. Narrated through dense layers of newsprint, saturated archival footage and fragmented sound, this imaginary film – an illicit affair between two women and their plot to set fire to the Iranian Ministry of Culture – becomes a fiction through which Tarfakory investigates the censorship of female desire and the politics of Iranian cinematic representation.
Old Masters
Basma Alsharif | 2025 | 14 minutes
Inspired by Gus Van Sant’s film Elephant (2003) and Alan Clarke’s earlier work (1989) of the same name, Old Masters follows two protagonists walking through the Gothenburg Museum of Art and an orange garden in Gaza. In conversation with fellow artists, Al-Sharif reflects on the role of witnessing and representing extreme violence. Drawing a stark contrast between what is preserved and what is destroyed, the film asks what it means to make images during and after genocide.
Where Russia Ends
Oleksiy Radynski | 2024 | 25 minutes | Ukrainian
Where Russia Ends assembles previously unknown footage shot by Ukrainian filmmakers during expeditions to Siberia and the Far North in the late 1980s, and rediscovered at the Kyiv Popular Science Film Studio in 2022. Reading this Soviet-era archive against the grain, Radynski traces an often-overlooked history of Russian colonial expansion and environmental destruction in the territories of the Indigenous peoples of Siberia. Rediscovered amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, these images bring histories of Tsarist and Soviet imperialism into the present, tracing continuities that are far from over.
Tickets and booking
- General admission: £9
- Concessions: £7
- Festival passes: £32 for one or £52 for two
Each ticket includes a printed programme. Festival passes cover six screening nights, including the online screening, with only 30 passes available. You don’t need to be a SET Social member to attend; SET Social members can access concession prices.
Visiting the festival
SET Film Festival’s in-person screenings take place at SET Social in Peckham. For information about venue access, facilities and transport, visit SET Social’s accessibility page.
If you have access needs or questions specific to the festival, contact filmfestival@setspace.uk.
About SET Film Festival 2026
Founded in 2023, SET Film Festival is an independent, grassroots festival for contemporary, artist and archival film, run by London-based arts organisation SET and curated by Amina Ali, Ellie Dobbs and Verity Monroe. Returning for its fourth edition from 5 November to 5 December 2026, this year’s programme features four short-film nights, a feature-length screening and a free evening of archival film and performance. Each night centres on a distinct theme, with selected screenings followed by Q&As with filmmakers.
The festival concludes on Saturday 5 December with its inaugural awards, recognising work across four categories: Audience Choice, Special Mention, Best Artist Film and Best Documentary.
View the full festival programme here.
With support from Goldsmiths Exhibition Hub.
Poster design: @ashleykinnardstudio