Roy Claire Potter
Roy Claire Potter is an artist who performs, publishes and exhibits. Influenced by linguistics and performance theory, they often collaborate with musicians and sound artists for radio broadcast and music festivals. Across the wide range of their work that includes drawing, installation, experimental art writing, vocal performance and moving image, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings.
Roy’s interest in communication constraints, subtext and narrative sequencing is felt in the way they use fast-paced talking or reading speeds and restricted or partial views of space. Complicated social or group dynamics and the aftermath of violent events are common themes in Roy’s work, and are usually treated with a dark, sometimes wilful humour.
They have have recently presented work with Book Works, Serpentine, Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (2024), PRIMARY (2022/3), BBC Radio 3 (2020), Tate Britain and Tate Publishing (2019). Roy has published two chapbooks of experimental art writing, Round That Way (Ma Bibliotheque, 2017) and Mental Furniture (VerySmallKitchen 2014) and recently a novella, The Wastes (Book Works, 2024) commissioned by artist Katrina Palmer for Arrhythmia, a series of artist books that explore ideas of being out of joint with the predominant social order. Shorter works are published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Hotel Partisan, Tate Publishing, and CCA Derry-Londonderry.
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.
Documenting the landmark 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora, Shari Frilot’s seminal film captures a charged gathering of scholars, artists, and activists in dialogue. Through the voices of Essex Hemphill, Urvashi Vaid, Isaac Julien, and M. Jacqui Alexander and others, it crystallises a pivotal moment in diasporic queer history – interrogating Black and queer identity, media production, homophobia, and the contested terrain of Black nationalism.
Run Time
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.
Stemming from Cannach MacBride and Conal McStravick’s research with video and performance artist Mikiki, this programme focuses on Collective Care and Self Care, exploring practices of inheritance, resistance, speculation and survival across generations.
Run Time
Tracing the fragile, performative labour of communication across political stages and intimate sensory worlds, two films probe how meaning is transmitted, distorted, and sustained through noise.
Run Time
Join us for conversation, connection and a little collective exhale as we press pause on the screenings and gather around the table. Good films nourish the mind. But, good food and good company take care of everything else!
Filmed in Angus, Scotland, Soft Fruit follows migrant seasonal workers on an industrial berry farm as they pick, prepare and transport crops. Candid conversations and scenes of rebellious, collective gathering appear alongside observational footage in shifting visual formats – from high-definition video to 16mm, and CGI inspired by medieval Islamic cosmography – building a layered sense of time and place.
Collaging across media, performance and the archive, two films probe the architectures—material, political, and psychic—that shape Irish identity across borders. From a punative contemporary asylum system to the miasma of surveillance and hostility that shadowed Irish migrants to Britain in the 1970s and 80s, they expose a spectacle of belonging maintained and malformed by its systematic denial.
Run Time
Join us for a DJ set from local legend Hoo Har Loves Wax! Hoohar Loves Wax has been DJing since 1991, being involved in the free party scene in Norfolk this followed working in Bristol and across the festival scene.