The show consists of two day-long programmes of short films: first the documentaries, and then fiction and animation. Agents famously go along to the drama schools and snap up the new Oliviers, and shrewd collectors cast an eye over the art-college graduation shows and pick up gems from Young British Artists for a song. But who goes to the NFTS show?
Friends and family, obviously. Interested professionals take a look, surely? But I couldn't see any other journalists.
This was the first time I'd been to the NFTS show. What an interesting experience it was. It's pretty well beside the point to think about talent-spotting, when so many of the students here have already had their films presented at prestigious festivals.
These people are thinking big. Joe Tucker's sprightly animation For the Love of God had Steve Coogan, Ian McKellen and Julia David providing the voices. And Haris Vafeiades's 22-minute drama Moog, about an unfairly punished schoolboy, featured no less a figure than Stephen Frears (the NFTS's fiction direction tutor) in a cameo acting role - as a stern headmaster.
As for big names in the offing, I'm not sure where to place a bet. Among the documentaries, I enjoyed Piers Sanderson's The Second Mouse Gets the Cheese, a good investigative documentary about the shady closure of an apparently profitable textile factory. Some dodgy-looking dealings led to a nice little arrangement for the major players, asset-stripping the factory and flogging the land to real-estate developers.
But there was nothing for the workers whose generations of hard work laid the foundations of prosperity on which the deal was based - they were laid off without redundancy money. Sanderson cleverly stayed calm and let the audience get indignant. I started to wonder: shouldn't Fleet Street be covering this story?
David Lal e 's The End for Beginners was an outstandingly shot study on high-definition video of a Parisian retirement home, and Adam Gutch's The Ballad of Betty French, about a larger-than-life old lady in south Wales, had a drollery that was somewhere between Nick Broomfield and Molly Dineen (both NFTS graduates). The criticism I've heard levelled at these short films is that they are technically accomplished but deficient in risk and spark. Maybe there's an element of truth in that.
But the fiction features showed some directors who are clearly capable of more than just technique. The student with the most obvious auteur presence was Christian Barbe with his very long (59 minutes), difficult and striking-looking monochrome piece, Tribulation, about a couple's disintegrating relationship, which was cut down from about twice that length. This was a demanding picture to watch, though Barbe is very clearly a real film-maker - and I can very easily imagine the feature-length cut making the grade at a major festival.
We should acknowledge though, that Barbe isn't exactly a local boy made good: he studied in Chile and the US first. The other two films I liked best weren't by home-grown directors either: (Finnish-born) Miikka Leskinen's Firewood, a lovely-looking movie with a sense for the spaces of the countryside and a happy grasp of what is important about short films: less is more. Silvana Aguirre Zegarra, from Peru, gave us Ela, about an eight-year-old girl who suffers a family tragedy.
The poignancy of this little kid dealing with loss, and seeing things that remind her of this loss, was beautifully and subtly done. If there were shares on offer in Barbe, Leskinen and Aguirre Zegarra, I'd be on to my broker with the order: buy.
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