Molla Sagar
Molla Sagar (born 1975) is a prominent Bangladeshi filmmaker, cinematographer, and artist known for exploring rural life, social justice, and cultural practices. His films are made with a deep respect and empathy for the people he depicts, never allowing them to be depicted in a state of pity. He aims instead to show their resilience in the face of impossible challenges—from the salination of farmland and the consequences of open cast coal mining, to the fight for survival of people living on the bleeding edge of the climate emergency.
Based in Bagerhat, he trained in graphic design at Dhaka University. His films, often focusing on marginalised communities, include O Pakhi (2002), Dudh-Koyla (2006), and The Ilish.
A chance to drop-in, meet up and softly extend the themes of the project: community care, self care and palliative care as three pillars of care drawn by lgbtqia+ support groups and alternative healthcare. Pastries and tea included!
An event series, resource and film library inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat. Join us throughout the festival as three artists from Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada hosted by BFMAF explore resilient LGBTQIA+ community led care.
Your festival pit stop! Drop in for information about the town and the Festival – or simply warm up, catch up with friends, and take a breather between screenings. Our doors are open 10am–4pm throughout the Festival.
Relaxed Screenings are taking place at the Town Hall Council Chamber, our Relaxed Screen. Films are shown at the same time as screenings at the Maltings’ Cinema at the Barracks.
Intimate portraits of everyday life and struggle in Bangladesh speak together with playful, inter-textual vignettes exploring the confluence of autobiography and radical history. Together, Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar‘s films trace how personal memory and political upheaval collide, overlap, and refract across generations.
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Spanning Partition to contemporary Bangladesh, this programme journeys through fractured homes and unfinished films to ask how history lingers in bodies, cities, and celluloid. Between memory and the archives, the works trace disappearance, displacement, and the stubborn afterlives of images in the face of erasure.
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The quiet radiance of everyday acts emerges between a beautiful portrait of a Bangladeshi centenarian and a tender chronicle of a woman choosing a dignified death. This Focus programme touches on themes of ageing, autonomy, and what it means to inhabit—and ultimately release—the body.
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A participatory workshop exploring grief, communitarian care, and ways of imaging what we might palliate – led by Toronto/Tkaranto–based artist and community activist Mikiki.
Dub Epistemology is a series of hybrid talks and live audio essays by Ashley Holmes that treat sound as both archive and method—foregrounding movement, repetition, and re-performance as tools to imagine histories that circulate, mutate, and persist through listening, replay, and versioning.
Lesley Loksi Chan’s poignant work of archival intimacy blends fragments of her research notes with the unfinished footage of Lloyd Wong, a man who documented his life living with AIDS in the early 1990s. Rough and unprocessed, her film explores the meaning of queer inheritance, of incompletion, and the act of repeated looking.
A kilted warrior crowns the New York skyline in this joyous tribute to Jesse Rae, a musician from the Scottish Borders who plugged into the electric current of Parliament-Funkadelic. From bringing 80s NYC to a standstill atop the Brooklyn Bridge to shaping seminal hits like Inside Out, Rae fused tartan swagger with transatlantic groove to craft a mythic, pluralist vision of Scotland in the key of funk!
Join us for a full-throttle karaoke party inspired by the unstoppable spirit of Jesse Rae! Expect big tunes and zero inhibitions as we celebrate life, funk and fearless individuality the only way that feels right: loud, joyful and together!