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.
Run Time
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.
Run Time
This screening will be accompanied with an in person conversation with Camara Taylor (suspiration!) and will take place at The Maltings in Berwick-upon-Tweed.
Run Time
Hailstorm is based in the Narmada valley in central India, an area with extremely low levels of groundwater. Farmers here battle for survival, pitched against the vagaries of climate change. Following the events of a freak hailstorm over four seasons, the film unfolds the vulnerability and precarity of those that are at the sharpest end of global capitalism’s rapacious greed and the furthest from its benefits. —Jemma Desai
This collection of short form work by the Cambodian filmmakers associated with the production company Anti-Archive shows the breadth and quality of their filmmaking.
Run Time
Rock Bottom Riser is an immersive, exploratory and deeply inquisitive study of an island world at sea. The film fashions a layered and heterogeneous portrait of Hawaii through its cosmogony, its uncertain future and the scattered lens of the present. Through a combination of research, observation of the islands’ landscape and conversation with many different people who call it home, artist-filmmaker Fern Silva highlights the complexity and contradictions of a place which can be understood as beautiful and serene but also under constant existential threat.
In La Nave, Colombian artist and first-time filmmaker Carlos Maria Romero (aka Atabey Mamasita) translates the meaning and spirit of Carnival de Barranquilla during a year in which gatherings were forbidden. Through clandestinely filmed performances with members of many different communities—indigenous, trans, queer, rural, Afro-Colombian and radical outsiders among them—Maria Romero recreates northern Colombia’s largest cultural event as an essayistic performance film, demonstrating how Carnival is a lifeblood to its many diverse participants.
Run Time
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).
