Notes From a Collapsing World
The world is ending all the time. Politically, ecologically, inside the body, inside the home, and across places that no longer offer safety.
These films begin from that pressure point. A damaged landscape becomes a site of pleasure and resistance. A lost relationship carries the weight of queer life under repression. A return to the countryside exposes the distance between belonging and safety. A journey through the occupied West Bank becomes an encounter with violence, while two lovers at the edge of an unfamiliar world are forced to ask where home really is.
Across fiction, essay, documentary and experimental moving image, these films move through grief, displacement, occupation and impossible returns. But collapse is not only an ending here. It is also where other forms of life begin to grow: pleasure as resistance, memory as archive, nature as collaborator, and community as something built within hostile conditions.
Notes from a Collapsing World is a programme about staying with the damage without letting it have the final word. It is about lovers, landscapes, borders, loss and breath, and the small, stubborn ways queer life continues to reach towards a future.
We are delighted to welcome William Hong-xiao Wei, director of Elegy for the Lost, who will introduce the film before the screening.
Curated by Huss.
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Accessibility
This event has:
- English-BSL interpretation for the introduction. The interpreter for this event is TBC.
- Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Swiss German audio with English language Descriptive Subtitles.
- Live Captioning for the introduction.
- An induction loop is available at the GFT Box Office. Enhanced Audio (EA) is available in their screening rooms via headset.
This screening is 91 minutes long and has an age recommendation of N/C 18+
If you require access seating please get in touch. Access seating includes: wheelchair spaces, sitting in the front row / in the aisle / at the back. If you need any other provisions, please let us know by emailing [email protected] with your name, ticket information and access request. We will do our best to work with you whilst also managing the capacity of the venue. Thank you for working with us on this.
You can find out more information about accessibility at SQIFF 2026 here. If you have any questions about accessibility at SQIFF, please get in touch with us at [email protected]
Films in this programme include:
The Measure of Drowning, Dirs. Laure Giappiconi, Elisa Monteil, La Fille Renne, 2026, France, 7 min.
We no longer recognised neither flow nor forest. We had been halved, quartered, decimated. We had been fragmented, shattered. The measure of drowning is an ecosexual fable about breathing better even when drowning, finding ways to resist the collapse of life and re-nourishing desires.
Content notes: Depiction of explicit sex, nudity. Discussion of capitalism, violence.
Elegy for the Lost, Dir. William Hong-xiao Wei, 2025, France, Spain, United Kingdom, China, 30 min.
Through the introspective voiceover of a young post-pandemic Chinese migrant in Europe, the essay film interweaves her private memories of queer intimacy with public narratives of resistance, confronting the personal cost of existing in the current age of turbulence and regression, in a world that demands their silence.
Access notes: Flashing lights, strobes.
Content notes: Depiction of violence. Discussion of censorship, COVID-19 pandemic, displacement, homophobia, police, surveillance.
The Headgear, Dir. Marcel Hörler, 2026, Switzerland, 18 min.
A hardened state that inscribes itself into bodies. Fascinating and tormenting at once. In search of queer liberation, we walk along the memories of the director. To the places where he grew up in the countryside. He wants to go back, but he cannot. Past idyllic landscapes and frozen waters, towards communities that promise something to hold onto. And so we move, step by step, between reality and fiction, to a place that finally holds him.
COYOTES, Dir. Said Zagha, 2025, Palestine, France, United Kingdom, Jordan, 20 min.
A Palestinian surgeon drives home after a long night shift, but little does she know that a commute through a desolate West Bank road will change her forever.
Content notes: Depiction of blood, death, military, violence.
The Ones Who Walk, Dirs. Billie Sorribès, Lucien Pin, 2026, France, 16 min.
On the shores of a lake bordered by blood-red earth, two women are in love. One wants to stay, the other wants to go home. As they wander around the lake, this disagreement prompts them to take stock of their relationship. As the day fades and a strange despair washes over them, a question arises. Where do they really come from?
Content notes: Discussion of capitalism, facism.
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Supported by Screen Scotland, the BFI Audience Projects Fund and Film Hub Scotland (part of the BFI Film Audience Network), all awarding National Lottery funding.
Image Credit: COYOTES, Dir. Said Zagha, 2025