Storytelling thrives on possibility. Across film, XR, Games and now podcasting, artists are finding new ways to shape experience, build worlds and bring audiences into closer contact with ideas. Aesthetica Film Festival has expanded its programme in recent years to reflect this evolving landscape, recognising that contemporary narrative can be immersive, interactive, visual, audible and deeply participatory. This year, the Podcasting Lounge brings 20 podcasts into the public programme, making Aesthetica Film Festival the only UK film festival to include podcasts as part of its public programme. Its presence at the festival creates a space to encounter voices, ideas and stories through sound and, in a culture increasingly defined by speed, offers something increasingly valuable: the opportunity to pause.

Listening creates a particular kind of attention. Without a fixed image directing the eye, sound leaves room for the imagination to construct its own landscapes, faces and environments, while voice can communicate intimacy in ways that feel immediate and unmediated. Podcasts can accompany everyday life, but the best examples also have the capacity to transform it, turning a walk, journey or quiet afternoon into a space for concentrated engagement. Bringing podcasting into the festival environment makes that relationship visible, positioning audio alongside the other forms of moving-image and digital culture that Aesthetica has embraced. Therefore, the Lounge becomes a significant meeting point between established traditions of oral storytelling and the rapidly changing possibilities of contemporary media.

For Cherie Federico, Director of Aesthetica Film Festival, this expansion reflects an ongoing commitment to following where creative practice is moving: “Aesthetica has always been interested in where stories are going next, and podcasting gives us another way to think about voice, character and audience. The Podcasting Lounge creates a moment to stop, listen and discover work that might otherwise exist outside the traditional structures of film culture. We want the festival to be a place where different forms can meet – where a podcast can sit alongside a film, a game or an immersive experience, and expand our understanding of what storytelling can be.”

Curation becomes particularly important within this expanded field. The Podcasting Lounge brings together 20 works spanning comedy, documentary, investigative journalism, fiction and folklore, demonstrating how broad the medium has become while resisting the idea that it needs a single defining aesthetic. Its presence alongside XR and Games reflects Aesthetica’s wider interest in artists who are experimenting with new forms of audience engagement. As the only UK film festival to include podcasts within its public programme, Aesthetica is also creating a space for audio to be considered within a wider festival discourse around contemporary storytelling. These developments speak to a broader cultural shift in which the distinctions between cinema, performance, digital art and audio are becoming increasingly porous.

Humour offers one particularly revealing entry point. Problems with Julia Masli follows Estonian clown Julia Masli, who has spent three years attempting to solve the world’s problems with a microphone taped to a mannequin leg. The absurdity of the premise is central to its appeal, but comedy here becomes a method of enquiry, allowing Masli to encounter anxieties and frustrations through spontaneous, often unexpected exchanges. Her practice connects to a longer history of artists using humour and performance to question the structures of everyday life, from Dada’s embrace of nonsense to contemporary participatory art. The podcast extends that encounter into the realm of listening, preserving the immediacy of the voice while allowing audiences to imagine the scenes around it.

Place, meanwhile, becomes the organising principle of Anglia Square: The Little City. Set within Norwich, the podcast considers a dilapidated 1960s development facing demolition and regeneration, asking what happens to the people whose lives are embedded within a changing urban landscape. Residents, artists losing studio space and businesses forced to close provide perspectives that complicate the polished language of redevelopment, bringing questions of memory, ownership and belonging particularly into focus. Contemporary urban criticism increasingly asks who it is that actually gets to shape the future of a city, and whose histories are preserved or erased in the process. By giving space to individual voices, the podcast transforms regeneration from an abstract planning issue into an intimate human story.

Questions of belief take on a personal aspect in The Foil. Journalist Maya Kroth discovers that her father has amassed a YouTube following through his newfound belief in aliens, a revelation that unsettles their relationship as well as her own assumptions about belief, evidence and identity. The podcast moves between family history and an examination of online culture, where ideas can gather momentum through recommendation systems and communities of shared conviction. Yet its most compelling territory is emotional not technological, exploring what happens when the digital worlds people inhabit begin to reshape relationships in the physical world. Kroth’s story shows the strength of audio documentary, where hesitation, tone and dialogue can convey the complexity of experiences that resist simple explanation.

Fiction opens another set of possibilities in Wine Night, which follows Kelen Brooks and three friends after they stumble upon a murder mystery during an evening together. Their Chardonnay-fuelled investigation takes them deeper into the secrets of a town they thought they knew, using the conventions of crime storytelling to explore friendship, community and hidden histories. Podcast fiction has inherited much from radio drama, while developing its own contemporary language through immersive sound design and serial storytelling. A creaking door, an approaching voice or a moment of silence can become as crucial as dialogue, creating suspense through suggestion not visual revelation. Here, the form asks audiences to become active members in constructing the world, completing the story through imagination.

That relationship between voice and imagination also sits at the heart of Tales From the Singing Porch: The Salesman. Little Klaus Apero knows that winter will be difficult for his village, where animals are disappearing and residents are searching for explanations, until the arrival of a charismatic salesman changes everything. Drawing on the atmosphere of folklore, the story places a mysterious outsider within an isolated community, opening familiar questions around trust, temptation and transformation. Its connection to oral storytelling is particularly resonant, recalling traditions in which narratives were carried from one generation to another through voice, memory and performance. Heard through headphones, that communal tradition becomes intimate, creating the sensation of entering another world through sound.

Together, these five podcasts offer a glimpse into the wider range contained within the Lounge’s 20-title programme. They move from comedy to urban documentary, family investigation, crime fiction and folklore, yet each depends on the same fundamental relationship between storyteller and listener. Their inclusion within Aesthetica Film Festival’s programme reflects a wider curatorial commitment to artists who are questioning how stories can be experienced, rather than simply where they should be categorised. XR, Games and podcasting each expand the festival’s understanding of what an audience can do, feel and imagine, offering other forms of participation and attention. The Podcasting Lounge creates a space to slow down, listen and consider the creative possibilities that emerge when sound is given room to lead.

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Words: Simon Cartwright 

Aesthetica Film Festival 2026 runs 4-8 November in York, UK. Click here to book your festival pass.

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