Maltings Henry Travers
Located on Eastern Lane, The Maltings is the festival’s main hub. The Henry Travers Studio at The Maltings is named after the eponymous film and stage actor, whose best known role was guardian angel Clarence Odbody in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. The Henry Travers Studio a black-box studio space which can seat up to 120.
Isabelle Stengers: Building hope on the edge of the abyss
A mysterious house and a magical forest are staging for a playful portrait of Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Seated amongst verdant overgrowth, dusty ephemera and the occasional stray cat, Stengers expands on the ideas that have shaped her life and work. Intimate and pleasurable, the film delivers an empowering and hopeful message about how to survive in a world of ruins and the potential of collective action.
Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, Basma al-Sharif’s work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
Join us for a special in focus conversation with Basma al-Sharif, BFMAF24 Filmmaker in Focus led by Dr Viviane Saglier, lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews.
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Anti-colonial intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore were all in the heart of Empire – London – in 1947. They were imagining a world after colonialism, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss, what did they conjure?
A Radical Duet is a dual timeline hybrid film about two women of different generations who come together to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play.
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An intimate, multifaceted portrait of the Krahô people indigenous to northeastern Brazil. Made in close collaboration with the community, The Buriti Flower sketches the rhythms, dreams and ways of being connecting families working to protect their land from the cyclical violence of encroaching settlements. Blending observational documentary and staged scenes, it depicts the flow of life on a continuum of ever-replenishing strength and resistance.
Basma al-Sharif’s first feature film is an experimental homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope against hopelessness. Departing from the ancient symbol of the ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail – the film follows a man moving through different landscapes in search of a past lover. A multilingual journey through time and space reflecting on recurrent patterns of destruction and regeneration, representation and erasure.
Marking the centenary of her birth, BFMAF presents a new restoration of the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius, one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors. The tenacious Valentina, recently freed from prison in Soviet Russia, heads back to her native Estonia on a quest to find her son Jüri. A Stolen Meeting touches on powerful themes of migration, rootlessness, reconciliation and motherhood at the end of the Soviet Era.
Maria Fusco is a working-class writer who grew up during the Troubles in Belfast. This Propositions event clashes together two BBC TV plays and an artist’s film to explore the ongoing legacies of censorship, voice and socio-cultural velocity with particular reference to the BBC’s broadcasting ban of 1988 to 1994 of Northern Irish (largely Nationalist) politicians.
The event title is a quote from Reginald Maudling, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1970-72
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Nadia El Fani’s pre-Jasmin Revolution espionage fable follows our hero Kalt as she hijacks the airwaves to broadcast political messages from a remote mountain village in Tunisia. Things quickly turn into a sexually charged game of cat-and-mouse with French intelligence officer Julia as the pair struggle with oppositional missions. Brimming with queer and revolutionary potential Bedwin Hacker is keenly critical of the security apparatus of the French state and its targeting of immigrant communities.
Five new films collaboratively combined to form a single work responding to Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s luminous News From Home (1976). Artists Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, Eva Giolo, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Katja Mater, and Maaike Neuville each engage in their own way with the epistolary device of Akerman’s film, as well as recurrent themes of alienation, distance and the mother-daughter relationship.
The first of two screening programmes animating the work of Basma al-Sharif, BFMAF24 Filmmaker in Focus.
Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, her work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
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BFI NETWORK partners BFI Doc Society and Film Hub North are hosting an informal talent mixer for independent filmmakers and narrative/doc-curious creatives
BFI Mixers bring together local creatives and provide opportunities for growing your network, finding collaborators and connecting with the filmmaking community. There’s no set agenda for these events; we encourage you to introduce yourself to someone new and get talking.
The event also offers the chance to connect with BFI representatives, hear about regional opportunities and short film funding from Jen Bradfield (BFI NETWORK Talent Executive, Film Hub North) and Luke Moody (Head of the BFI Doc Society Fund).
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BFMAF and artist-run, Brussels-based film and distribution platform elephy invite you to join them for a peer-to-peer roundtable conversation called “Talking Collectively”. Here, artists, filmmakers, arts collectives, producers, distributors, curators, and writers come together to share know-how, triumphs and trials in the field of moving image and visual arts. Register here and propose a question, concern, or talking point on development, creation and (co-)production, distribution and presentation, self-organisation and maintenance.
This event is made possible with the support of the (Re)Connect with the UK grant of Flanders Arts Institute/Kunstenpunt (BE).
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From the beginning of 2021, as the UK continued to confront the Covid pandemic, staff working in one North East England care home were invited to film their everyday lives. Care leads us through the ups and downs of life in the home over 12 months through the eyes, words, and newly learnt camera skills of those working and living there. As residents celebrate their own milestones, from 100th birthdays to winning at bingo and enjoy Christmas parties and VE Day, the film gives a joyful, challenging, and emotional insight into life, love and loss inside the home during and beyond the worst days of the pandemic.
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Translating as “Maputo, I Love You”, Brazilian filmmaker Ariadine Zampaulo’s hybrid cine-poem stiches together elements of documentary, fabulation, performance, and soundscape to produce a polyphonic portrait of Mozambique’s capital city. Her camera beautifully captures the flow and rhythms of urban life unfolding over the course of a single day: Revellers spill from nightclubs as workers board commuter trains; tourists and joggers vie for position in the city’s ancient streets; and a local radio station announces the disappearance of a bride.
Rea Tajiri’s vibrant, tender cine-poem is fashioned in collaboration with her mother, Rose, as together they confront the painful, curious reality of wisdom “gone wild” in the shadows of dementia. Made over sixteen years, the film blends fact and fiction, humour and sadness, to stage a fragmented, dream-like encounter between mother and daughter that blooms into an affectionate portrait of love, care, and a relationship transformed.
An in-person screening-performance by award-winning Iranian artist, Maryam Tafakory, whose textual and filmic collages interweave poetry, documentary, archival, and found material.
“To the outsiders, the bystanders, the virtual onlookers, to the disaster capitalist, the hopeless, the failed revolutionist—from wherever you are standing, come a step closer and listen as we try to rewind, to fast forward, to pause, to look away…”
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An open discussion on the work of this year’s Filmmakers in Focus, Anastasia Lapsui & Markku Lehmuskallio with their close collaborator Johannes Lehmuskallio (co-director, cinematographer and actor), academic Caroline Damiens (Université Paris Nanterre), and BFMAF Programmer Herb Shellenberger. We will engage with the collaborative, “Fourth Cinema” approach to filmmaking taken up by Lapsui, Lehmuskallio and their collaborators which include Indigenous communities in regions of the Circumpolar North. The conversation will explore beyond the four titles in our retrospective, towards a richer picture of their filmmaking oeuvre and the politics and poetics of representation through hybrid forms of cinema.
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What is to be done when our homes and our dreams have been invaded? Graeme Arnfield’s nightmarish essay film traces the curious history of the doorbell, from its invention and reinventions through 19th century labour struggles, to the nascent years of narrative cinema and contemporary surveillance cultures. Home Invasion paints a terrifying portrait of technological ideologies and imaginaries shaping our everyday lives, staging a confrontation with the reality of machines and systems that work against us, hindering the emergence of radical futures.
A presentation of Helena Solberg’s debut short films (1966-69) alongside her 1982 feature From the Ashes: Nicaragua Today which brings a multi-layered feminist perspective to a political and societal portrait of the country following the 1979 insurrection that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. Her shorts, made during one of the most repressive moments of the Brazilian military dictatorship, examine the unliveable conditions experienced by communities under oppression and emphasise women’s agency as active protagonists in the living and telling of their own stories.
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Sepa: Our Lord of the Miracles • After the Dust
A pairing of films made in Peru exploring the politics and poetics of justice, liberty, remembrance and forgetting. Walter Saxer’s Sepa: Our Lord of the Miracles traces stories of people lost to the enclosed reality of the prison system, whilst Colectivo Silencio’s After the Dust reanimates voices of resistance often-willingly forgotten within the enclosed system of the nation state.
Renegade remixologists Soda Jerk return with Hello Dankness, a bent suburban musical comprised entirely of pirated film samples that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in the American suburbs, the film follows a neighbourhood as consensus reality disintegrates into conspiracies and other political contagions. Part political satire, zombie stoner film, and Greek tragedy, Hello Dankness is also informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture.
Christopher Ulutupu is an artist of Samoan/Niuean/German descent currently residing in Wellington. Through a richly pop, queer and celebratory Pacific lens he creates new narrative forms opening up conversations around collaboration, connection, and disconnection. The Pleasures of Unbelonging is a new commission presented by CIRCUIT with support from TAUTAI, Creative New Zealand and BFMAF. Following its world premiere screening Christopher will be in conversation with May Adadol Ingawanij, Professor of Cinematic Arts at University of Westminster.
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Three short works by young filmmakers in Berwick, made collaboratively with artists Kimberley O’Neill and Kathryn Elkin. Applying techniques of digital filmmaking and documentary storytelling, the films explore entangled relationships between people, technology and the local environment.
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Meriem Bennani’s playful sci-fi trilogy mixes live action, day-glo animation, and a kaleidoscopic score by Fatima Al Qadiri to explore the entangled politics of immigration, state control, and the border zone. Episodes focus on inhabitants of the fictional island of CAPS (short for ‘capsule’), a magnetically sealed megalopolis created to intercept refugees attempting to teleport illegally into the US. Citizens work together to develop new modes of defiance and resistance, harnessing not only emergent biotechnologies but also the liberatory potential of joy and humour.
The Void Project looks at the effect of the absence of Palestinian visual archives on the construction of a Palestinian visual narrative. The project was founded by Palestinian documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, producer and writer Azza El-Hassan, whose documentary films mostly reflect her experience living in exile and her experience living in Palestine. In this programme, El-Hassan brings together a selection of films produced by the Palestine Film Institute in Jordan and Lebanon during the revolutionary years of Palestinian Cinema. These films are a testimony to both the history of international solidarity with Palestine, as well as the ongoing struggle for a self determined Palestinian narrative. — Jemma Desai
The screening at the Maltings will be introduced by Sheyma Buali, a programmer, producer and writer and member of the London Palestine Film Festival programming team since 2011.
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In a village in central India, dedicated school teachers put their heart and soul into preparing a group of children for an entrance exam for a Government-run “School of Excellence.” Entrance Exam explores the stakes of the opportunities afforded by this continued, subsidised education for underprivileged children, as well as the many layers of struggle in this intense and surprising journey.
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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.
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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
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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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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The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun follows Sili, a girl traversing Dakar’s many obstacles with her crutches. After starting to work as a newspaper vendor, she quickly runs afoul of territorial boys who see her as a competitor. Djibril Diop Mambéty’s final film is handled with gentle lightness and grace, providing incontrovertible evidence of his place not only as a master of African cinema, but as a pivotal figure in the history of cinema. — Herb Shellenberger
This screening and conversation, programmed by Rabz Lansiquot, pairs dancer Zinzi Minott’s durational film works Fi Dem (2018) and Fi Dem II (2019) with Judah Attille’s Sankofa Film & Video Collective-produced Dreaming Rivers (1988) to consider lineages of Black British experimental film.
Q&A with Zinzi Minott
This programme is supported by the Independent Cinema Office as part of a forthcoming project with LUX celebrating films made in and around the Black British film workshops of the 1980s
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Fairytales and fables form the fulcrum of these short films. Zlatko Bourek’s psychedelic-era animation The Cat is a day-glo adaptation of Aesop’s ‘Venus and the Cat’, in which a man falls in love with a cat-turned-woman.
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Love affairs, horse races and male duels unfold at an isolated hippodrome by the sea inhabited by excessive, eccentric characters who strut and pose, fanatically declaim and obsess about their own ‘enthusiasms’. The film’s extravagant monologues were written and performed by the charismatic Renata Litvinova, whose screen presence channels equal parts Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and the loquacious self-possession of a Warholian superstar. Litvinova, a professional screenwriter was discovered by Muratova, immediately becoming a member of her on-screen ‘family’, as well as a cult diva of the new Russian cinema.
From research to writing, through performance and film, this seminar led by BFMAF 2019 Artist in Profile Marwa Arsanios follows the different stages of building a work—from the act of reading and writing to performing a text out loud to an audience and in front of the camera.
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The Meadow Mari are a Finno-Urgic ethnic group living on the left bank of the Volga River in central Russia, sometimes called ‘the last authentic pagans in Europe’. Their religion—Mari Paganism—is based on the worship of the forces of nature, and mass prayers are held in sacred groves at specific times according to the positioning of the Moon and the Sun. Mari were persecuted during the Soviet Union, but their faith has been given official status by the Russian government since the 1990s. However, some native religion believers contend that there is still a trend to Russify Mari culture and religion.
Lionel Soukaz is a pivotal figure in European queer cinema: a filmmaker, collaborator with queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem and organiser of the first festivals of Cinémas Différents in France. Combining the pop cultural ironies of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger with protest cinema, his films target the norms of heterosexual and homosexual culture alike, calling for the end of identity and the free reign of desire. Writer/curator Paul Clinton presents two works by Soukaz with an illustrated lecture.
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Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece A Hundred Faces for a Single Day ends with the send-off, “I don’t care when or how I will die, as long as there are armed men who will continue the march, shaking the earth with their uproar so that the world won’t sleep heavily over the bodies of the laborious, miserable and oppressed men.” Through this fiction-documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a strong critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s Golden Age (which would end in 1975 with a gruelling and protracted civil war). An essay on labour, class, social relations and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his “manifesto on cinema”, a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage and an embedded perspectives on direct action.
Selected by Artist in Profile Marwa Arsanios, who will introduce the film
Christian Ghazi’s incendiary, avant-garde masterpiece A Hundred Faces for a Single Day ends with the send-off, “I don’t care when or how I will die, as long as there are armed men who will continue the march, shaking the earth with their uproar so that the world won’t sleep heavily over the bodies of the laborious, miserable and oppressed men.” Through this fiction-documentary hybrid film, Ghazi forged a strong critique of bourgeois society in Beirut during Lebanon’s Golden Age (which would end in 1975 with a gruelling and protracted civil war). An essay on labour, class, social relations and resistance, Ghazi considered the film his “manifesto on cinema”, a powerful and polemical work that reaches back to the early decades of film experimentation while pioneering radical techniques in multivalent sound, disjunctive montage and an embedded perspectives on direct action.
Selected by Artist in Profile Marwa Arsanios, who will introduce the film
This programme brings together Marwa Arsanios’ new work Amateurs, Stars and Extras or the labor of love with her earlier, much-lauded film Have You Ever Killed a Bear or Becoming Jamila.
Q&A with filmmaker Marwa Arsanios
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Interleaving the archive (Group Action with KK) is a performative lecture by Holly Argent that brings together a spoken semi-fictive narrative, photographic transparents on an overhead projector, a live video-feed projection and a screening of a number of films by Polish artist duo KwieKulik (Przemyslaw Kwiek and Zofia Kulik). Also known as KK, the duo were making work in Warsaw, Poland between 1971–87. Their political and often ephemeral work attempted to expose their situation as artists working under communist rule in the People’s Republic of Poland.
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After living wild for a week, Astrid’s 13-year-old son Phillip returns home without saying a word. Only gradually does everyday life get back on track. Astrid now finds herself confronted with questions that provide a whole new perspective on her middle-class existence and her career in Berlin’s cultural sector. At home, it becomes more and more difficult for this single mother to accept that her son is leading his own life. The family may be disintegrating, but only to form itself anew.
Supported by Goethe-Institut London
Steffanie Ling (Artistic Director, Images Festival) presents Broken Clocks, a selectrospective of Vancouver-based artist Kasper Feyrer’s 16mm films originally shown as installations. By filming their sculptures as props, and the gallery installation as set, each exhibition seeps into the next, creating the causes and conditions for the next film to germinate. Feyrer’s use of ‘practical film effects’—such as physical objects and non-digital special effects made for the verisimilitude of the camera—fashion a world of techniques and materials designed to mirror our own without the pretext of permanence.
Q&A with filmmaker Kasper Feyrer
Co-presented with Images Festival
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This shorts programme looks at filmmakers cinematically adapting folkloric legends from their own cultures. Busójáráskor is an ethnographic documentary on the Hungarian celebration of Busójárás, in which people dress as horned monsters with carved wooden masks. Nigerien filmmaker Moustapha Alassane’s The Ring of King Koda adapts a Zarma legend in which a king tests the loyalty of a fisherman. Nana Tchitchoua’s Impressions from Rustaveli melds the Georgian medieval poet’s writings with the cinematic language of Sergei Parajanov and Jack Smith.
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The episodically connected lives of four college friends unfold throughout the incipient martial law years, as they struggle to define their sexual and professional desires and how best to attain them. An observational drama that does not shy away from topics such as abortion, prostitution, patriarchy, homosexuality, military violence and the repressive social conditioning of collective imaginaries, this understated feminist inquiry into the possibilities of sustaining queer kinships stands out as a singular achievement of woman-centred Philippine cinema. — Letitia Calin
Meet Animistic Apparatus’s featured artists. In this conversational session Lucy Davis, Chris Chong and Tanatchai Bandasak talk about their artistic engagement with ecology, cosmology, and the politics of environment and land in Southeast Asia. May Adadol Ingawanij introduces the project’s speculative method of exploring animistic relations and artists’ moving image.
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Aura Satz presents the UK premiere of her film Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road) and discusses her wider research on sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren. Her project proposes a speculative re-imagining of emergency signals—it posits the siren’s loud glissando wail as a conditioned and learned signal, one that can potentially be productively rewired.
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Artist, writer and curator Morgan Quaintance presents his new film Another Decade, alongside a programme of material that extends and details themes within it.
Another Decade combines archive and found footage from the 1990s with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 INIVA conference ‘Towards a New Internationalism’, Another Decade ranges across diverse cultural territory, and is propelled by a sense that very little socio- cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom since that time.
The dynamic tension explored in the work is between, on the one hand, art world actors speaking a truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry. Those who necessarily inhabit a centre of otherness.
These are positions that are drawn out in the selection of films that make up the accompanying programme. A suite of new works made by Quaintance—including a rumination on British Empire and the English countryside set to the words of Jimmie Durham, as well as a work examining the artist’s experiences growing up in South London—will be accompanied by several clips from a video pen pal exchange project facilitated by artist Russell Newell in 1994–95. Exchanged between kids in London and Los Angeles, the videos show participants talking about their neighbourhoods, giving tours of their schools, and discussings aspects of their culture like music, fashion and gangs.
While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical view over the decade, this range of films seek to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, more iconoclastic and more confrontational decade.
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Some Interviews on Personal Matters is one of the first feminist films of Soviet cinema and comes to Berwick freshly restored by Arsenal Berlin. Lana Gogoberidze’s narrative follows Sofiko, a journalist who interviews a wide range of women about their lives, desires and domestic labour. Laying bare the connections between the private and political in almost documentary style, the film focuses on the struggle between Sofiko’s independence and her obligations towards her own family. A powerful performance by Sofiko Chiaureli—who viewers will recognize from her iconic role in Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates—is at the center of what is a quite personal film for Lana Gogoberidze, one of three generations of Georgian women filmmakers from her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze (an associate of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Mikhail Kalatozov in the 1930s) to her daughter Salome Alexi.