LONDON.- The Fashion in Film Festival, a non-profit arts organisation based at UAL Central Saint Martins, is returning with its BFI-backed 2025 edition GROUNDED: Fashion’s Entanglements with Nature – a landmark programme that uses cinema to explore the complex relationship between fashion and nature, and raise awareness of the nuanced ecological crises that we are facing as a society.

Spanning the early 20th century to present day, the programme examines fashion’s role as simultaneously a barrier and a connecting tissue between humans and the natural world. With over 30 titles across a diverse range of film forms — documentary, fiction, artist and experimental cinema, early cinema and fashion film — GROUNDED presents diverse narratives addressing ecological and geopolitical concerns while exploring imaginative spaces of poetry, comedy, beauty, joy, horror, and transgression.

The co-curators Marketa Uhlirova & Dal Chodha said: "The festival programme highlights cinema as a powerful multisensory experience that can expand our perception of the world. It has the capacity to express intricate ideas about what fashion is and could be, and how the fashioned human body interacts with the non-human world.

While working on Grounded, we wanted to take the idea of 'curating' back to its original meaning, which is caring for something or tending to something. We have tended to our films like gardeners tend to trees, trying to grow new branches of thought as well as some hope for the future."

The festival’s UK-wide leg will take place at the following iconic independent arts venues from September-October: Watershed Bristol, Arnolfini Bristol, Exeter Phoenix, Plymouth Arts Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts (in partnership with V&A Dundee), Eden Court Inverness, Glasgow Film Theatre, Garnet Hill Multicultural Centre. The festival will also collaborate with V&A Dundee on their Garden Futures: Designing with Nature exhibition.

The festival is committed to inclusivity and accessibility, and is devoted to serving a diverse audience of young people, engaging them in the power of cinema and the environmental, social and cultural issues that the films raise. The programme include several accessible screenings aimed at engaging underrepresented groups, and will include a community screening at celebrated local cultural venue Garnet Hill Multicultural Centre.

John McKnight, BFI Audiences Manager said: “We’re very pleased to be supporting this culturally ambitious festival for the first time. With the environment and natural world as a central theme, alongside its fashion-focus, the diverse film programme and strong curatorial voice will surely bring new audiences to independent film and cinemas.”

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE FESTIVAL’S UK-WIDE PROGRAMME INCLUDE:

Sacred Transmission explores the presence of gods and spirits inhabiting the natural world, via films from Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and Spanish filmmaker Rocío Mesa, curated by Fashion in Film Festival co-founded Christel Tsilibaris.

Ready-to-wear Landscapes The production, dispersal and eventual re-distribution of clothing is one of the protagonists of the climate crisis. In partnership with TRASH CLUB’s founder Matthew Needham, this programme zooms in on the term ‘waste colonialism’ and reveals the ways in which creativity can be deployed to amplify collective concerns.

Cartographies of Memory, a showcase from multidisciplinary Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers, whose video work uses to Black hair as a site to explore colonialism, history, place and agency, followed by a conversation between the artist and British curator Karen Alexander.

Kosai Sekine’s Dust to Dust (2023), which tracks the lifecycle of fabric from the landfills of Kenya to Parisian runways.

We Are All Chimeras, a shorts programme and talk from Central Saint Martin’s Senior Lecturer Margarita Louca, exploring nonhuman or hybrid states – whether through flora and fauna, mythic creatures or surreal transformations – to frame and examine identity, ecology, society, and the boundaries between self and other.

Jodie Mack’s The Grand Bizarre (2018), the first feature-length film from experimental filmmaker celebrated for her vibrant, handmade 16mm films that blend stop-motion, collage and abstract animation.

The festival has completed its London leg, where highlights included a special showcase of silent films soundtracked by a live musical score from Musarc, several UK premieres — including Alexandra Gulea’s Maia: A Portrait with Hands (2024) and — as well as archival restorations like The Dancing Fleece, a charming ballet fashion film commissioned by the British wool industry in 1950 and a very rare screening of Ogawa collective’s Raising Silkworms from 1977.