St Andrews Film Festival 2025

By Ash Johann

At this year’s St Andrews Film Festival, Amaurea was right in the middle of it: screening First Second, curating the short-film programs, and bringing together filmmakers from Scotland and China. It was an intense few days, but the kind that leaves you glad you said yes to everything.

Our film First Second was part of the festival program. It had already won Best AI Film at the Mainframe Film Festival in Beijing, which still feels slightly unreal to say out loud. The story follows two lovers and the imagined worlds they build so they can be together. It’s quiet, dreamlike, and a little strange. Watching it in St Andrews was different from showing it in China. The response felt smaller in scale but more personal, like people were tuning in to the emotional rhythm rather than the technology behind it.

I also curated this year’s short-film program, which meant watching a lot of submissions and trying to build something that would make sense in the room. I wanted Scottish filmmakers to have the spotlight. The work being done here feels direct and full of texture. ICare9000, Guttin’ Quines and This Werewolf Complex took the main prizes, and each brought something distinctive to the screen.

During the Q&A sessions it was clear how much these films connected with local people. The questions often circled back to place and memory, to how film can hold on to something that might otherwise slip away. There was an honesty to those conversations that reminded me why festivals matter.

I study in Beijing, which gave me a chance to help bring in filmmakers from there too. I first met 17-year-old Wang Mitong, director of Goose Ridge, at a networking event in the city. Her film stayed with me for its calmness and its sense of distance, speaking with quiet confidence and emotional clarity. Watching it play in Scotland felt right. It fit nicely into the festival, like it belonged there from the start.

I hope that exchange keeps growing. Scottish and Chinese filmmakers come from very different worlds, but the desire to experiment and to tell stories that feel real runs through both.

Independent films are unpredictable. It doesn’t always work, and that’s part of the point. What matters is the space it creates for ideas that wouldn’t exist anywhere else. Festivals like St Andrews give that space shape. They turn it into something people can walk into, sit down with, and talk about.

I left with a notebook full of names, a head full of images, and the feeling that this is what cinema is supposed to do. Not save the world, just connect a few people who care about it.