Just as many of us grasped for connections during lockdown, the pandemic has inspired Eunic London, an umbrella organisation for EU cultural institutions, to dwell on the meaning of relationships for this year’s showcase for European short films, put together by curator Shira Macleod. Not all are – as the strand’s subtitle would have it – loving encounters: break-ups, bureaucratic frustration and unsettling alien fauna crop up, too. And the one explicitly Covid-related work, Romanian director Alina Manolache’s mesmerising I Am Here, features relationships by their absence: the social vacuum on display in CCTV footage from the Trevi Fountain, Chinese pharmacies, a British golf course and other depopulated locations around the world.
