The Edinburgh International University Film Festival (EIUFF) 2025 took place between the 31st of May and the 2nd of June. EIUFF is a student film festival. Find them @edi.iuff on Instagram.
Disco Boy – dir. Mafalda Lorijn – ★★★☆☆
After a birthday night out, a boy becomes fixated on a girl he sees dancing energetically at a club, an encounter that lingers in his mind. Lorijn captures the boy’s daily life with a social realist touch, effectively conveying the dullness and emotional inertia of his routine. The film is generally lovely in tone, but a more pronounced contrast between the bursts of energy and the monotony of everyday life would have made the direction more impactful. While the opening shot sets up the spatial world well, more carefully designed sound could have better drawn us into his psychological landscape.
Second Skin – dir. Jack-Murray Birrell – ★★★½
Influenced by the cinematic language of The Substance, Second Skin portrays the emotional and psychological aftermath of sexual assault through the lens of a young woman’s internal experience. While some of the visual effects could benefit from refinement, the film is an impressive achievement given its limited budget. It effectively conveys a sense of trauma, making strong use of the body horror genre to visualise internal conflict. One standout moment delicately reveals the complex and conflicting feelings many women may have toward their bodies after such experiences, an unsettling but thoughtful detail that elevates the film’s emotional depth.
Three Women Named Svetlana – dir. Natalia Boorsma – ★★★½
On a sunny spring day in Southern Serbia, three women—each named Svetlana—wait at a small train station. One is an architecture student, another is returning from Miami to visit her childhood home, and the third is the station officer. Natalia Boorsma brings a warm and whimsical charm to the film, with soft colours and compositions that at times recall Wes Anderson’s aesthetic. The pacing is gentle, allowing us to fully settle into the peaceful atmosphere of a Serbian afternoon. With an absurdist touch reminiscent of the play Waiting for Godot, the film subtly reflects on the effects of globalisation: how young people leave their hometowns in search of lives with more possibility, gradually draining these places of energy and vitality. Yet the film remains nostalgic without turning melancholic. Its celebratory ending avoids sentimentality and leaves us with a hopeful sense of belonging and the value of community.
Special Violent Interests & Maelstrom dir. Nameer Al-Tuhafi
and Ella Novie – ★★★☆☆
Presented by the Edinburgh Filmmaking Society—whose members also founded the EIUFF—these two student productions reflect the realisation of creative ambition within the resource limitations of grassroots filmmaking. In Special Violent Interests, two hitmen accidentally kill the wrong woman and must now track down their real target. In Maelstrom, a young actress suffers a panic attack during a student theatre performance, and her cast and crew try to coax her back on stage. Both films work within strong genre traditions—black comedy and psychological thriller—and show promise despite financial and temporal constraints. However, both would benefit from a deeper engagement with their respective genre conventions, especially in how they build and sustain tension toward their climaxes. Still, each demonstrates the potential of student filmmaking when driven by strong ideas and community support.
It was an incredibly pleasant afternoon at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, and we thoroughly enjoyed the post-show Q&A with some of the filmmakers and creatives. However, it would have been even better if captions had been provided for all the films in the programme.
Image provided by the Edinburgh International University Film Festival.