This week’s new film events

Raining Stones. Photograph: Allstar

London Short Film Festival

Both those bemoaning the lack of new British film-makers and more optimistic glass-half-full talent-spotters will be spoilt for choice here, possibly overwhelmingly so. There are 38 programmes of new British shorts alone, not to mention international work and documentaries. It’s all helpfully organised by genre (sample titles: Lo-Budget Mayhem, Femmes Fantastiques, God’s Lonely Men, WTF?), which could bring anything from gang-related conker fights to an operatic love story between a jar of jam and a slice of toast. There are also events dedicated to film-makers just off the radar (Jarman collaborator Richard Heslop, Norway’s Joern Utkilen and British artist Jessica Sarah Rinland), and a few very much on it (a Harmony Korine weekend, a retrospective of Nathanial Hörnblowér, AKA Beastie Boy Adam Yauch). There’s even a night dedicated to films about cats.

Various venues, to 17 Jan

Jim Allen Retrospective, Manchester

Jeremy Corbyn hasn’t declared his movie tastes as far as we know, but chances are Jim Allen is right up his street. In any case, the change in the political winds give the writer’s passionately socialism-driven works a new relevance. Allen, who died in 1999, is best known for his association with Ken Loach, particularly their 1990s features Land And Freedom, Hidden Agenda and the Manchester-shot Raining Stones. But their partnership goes back much further than that – all the way to Loach’s 1969 drama The Big Flame, part of the BBC’s landmark Wednesday Play series, and Days Of Hope, their monumental 1975 four-part working-class saga following a family from the first world war to the 1926 general strike. All the above and others play here, starting tonight with Roland Joffé’s silver jubilee-era family drama The Spongers, along with producer Tony Garnett, a long-time Allen/Loach collaborator, in conversation.

HOME, Sat to 31 Jan