Monica Mirabile
Zia Anger works in moving images. Her short films have screened at festivals such as New York Film Festival, Festival del Film Locarno, New Directors/New Films, AFI Fest, Maryland Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Vienna Independent Shorts. She has made music videos for various independent artists including: Angel Olsen, Mitski, Julianna Barwick, Beach House, Maggie Rogers, and Jenny Hval; the latter of whom she also toured with as a performer and stage director. In 2018 she began touring a new solo performance that traces the last ten years of her lost and abandoned work, titled My First Film (2015).
Monica Mirabile is a New York based artist whose work explores the physical vocabulary of authority existing at the intersection of choreography, visual art and group dynamics. She is one half of the performance duo FlucT, a collaboration with Sigrid Lauren exploring the psychology of capital obedience in American consumerism through sound and choreography. For 8 years Mirabile has operated a performance studio in Brooklyn called Otion Front Studio, a rehearsal space and performance residency organised with a fluctuating community of artists working through movement.
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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Filmmaker Zia Anger and movement artist Monica Mirabile present a performative conversation, working through their collaborative practice and a hypothetical future work.
Broadcast on Thursday 16 September, 7pm
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.