Éiméar McClay
Cáit McClay and Éiméar McClay are Irish-born, collaborative artists currently based in London. Their recent work has analysed both the British Imperial project in Ireland and the period following the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922 to examine the cultural, political and economic effects of colonisation. This has involved a focus on the network of social institutions – Magdalene Laundries, mother and baby homes, etc. – run by the Catholic church and the state in Ireland across the 20th century.
Their work has been selected for many esteemed exhibitions and awards, including Circa Class of 2020; Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020; TH4Y, GENERATORprojects; the 17th & 18th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival New Cinema Award; the Hospitalfield Graduate Programme; the Market Gallery Studio Projects residency; the CCA Derry residency; Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award 2021 & 2022; RSA New Contemporaries 2022; the RSA Stuart Prize 2022; the 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival; Queer Lisboa; aemi@GAZE 2022; Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival; Festival du Nouveau Ciné; Intersección, MAV Award; the Beijing International Short Film Festival; the CCA Glasgow Creative Lab residency; Docs Ireland; Memoryhouse, Glebe House; the Creative Scotland Open Fund Award; SQIFF 2023; Other Worlds, Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny; zoombiblestudy, Galerie FaVU; the Visual Arts Bursary Award 2024; aemi @ Docs Ireland: Back Translation; A Mother’s Love, Prayer Room; SQIFF 2024; and Intersección 2024.
Rajee Samarasinghe’s body of work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. BFMAF 2021 presents a series of Samarasinghe’s 12 short films shot over a decade—an archive of images navigating the terrain of migration, memory, and impermanence.
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Nguyễn Trinh Thi is one of Vietnam’s leading contemporary artists. Her moving image work engages with the ways in which memory, history and representation are part of broader structures of power, the legacies of colonialism and war, and the erasure of indigenous Vietnamese cultures.
Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Focus Programmes are supported by CREAM, University of Westminster and Centre for Screen Cultures at the University of St Andrew
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Language folds and falls in on itself in this new video work by artist duo Cat and Éiméar McClay. Animated 3D tableaus of Catholic paraphernalia and strikes of elemental weather accompany the words. Together, they enact the historically fraught relationship between queerness and the Catholic church.
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This screening will be accompanied with in person conversations with Éiméar McClay & Cat McClay (a body is a body is a body) and Rehana Zaman (Alternative Economies).
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In Tim Leyendekker’s debut feature film, victims, perpetrators and their observers offer entangled viewpoints on the 2007 Groningen HIV case in the Netherlands. In this case, three men hosting sex parties drugged others and injected them with their own HIV-infected blood. Feast explores the uneasy complexities, motivations, assumptions and projections of those involved and those watching: the media, the diagnosing professionals, and us, the viewers.
This screening will be accompanied with an in person conversation with Tim Leyendekker and will take place at The Maltings in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
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The Festival opens with the world premiere of Idrish (ইদ্রিস) by Adam Lewis Jacob (UK, Bangladesh, 2021).
Idrish acts as an urgent and potent piece of anti-deportation activism. With reports of deportation flights regularly in the news, the film is rich with resonance to our current moment. In one striking sequence, footage of a protest march gives way to staccato editing and propulsive sound design by Claude Nouk, who re-uses and manipulates archival sounds to transform the film into a powerful rallying cry. Radically reanimating the documentary form, Jacob enlivens the archive to tell a vital history.