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.
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.
A combined programme featuring Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s lyrical reflection on intimacy and surveillance through the development of British espionage, and Manuel Muñoz Rivas’ transporting voyage across an expanse of water, half-light and darkness.
Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, Being in a Place weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret Tait’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium. At the centre of the film is an imagining of an unrealised script for a feature film discovered amongst Margaret’s documents in Orkney titled, Heartlandscape: Being in a place – a document of a landscape, and of a journey through it.
A series of hypnotic, fragmentary encounters reflecting on creativity, desire, identity and transformation. Forms of transgressive potentiality are explored through poppers training videos, VHS tapes documenting an esoteric musical subculture, and a night of ritual shapeshifting in a Boston parking lot.
A programme of short works traversing hallucinatory dreamscapes, contested landscapes, and the precarious movements of bodies through time and space. Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel screens alongside contemporary artists, Basim Magdy, Marwa Arsanios and Fox Maxy.
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.
Films by Dani ReStack & Sheilah ReStack, Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil & Jackson Polys, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
History is what’s happening. It’s constantly unfurling never static and always in flux. Rather than being resigned to it, it’s incumbent upon us to shape and mould it into the gooey, slimy substance that we want our world to resemble. The time is now, the place is everywhere, all at once…
Q&A with filmmakers Emily Vey Duke, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
Films by Deborah Stratman, Patrick Staff, Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo, Lesley-Anne Cao, Chema García Ibarra & Ion de Sosa
‘Lazy Girl’ is an emblem of refusal. Like Hammer and Deren she moves to her own rhythm, turning resistance into art. So did Eric, a singular figure whose “proto-practice” was poetry—but he ran out of time. Marx said all politics reduces itself to the politics of time; too bad this leisurely splash in Montánchez is hardly a refusal of capitalism’s tempo but let’s kill time before it kills us.
