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.
When markets crash, connections fail and logic boards burn out, what becomes of our augmented selves? A programme of films reflecting the impact of technologies on human identity, consciousness, love and society under late capitalism.
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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.
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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An experimental horror film based on a series of paranormal events that took place in the early ’70s in Hexham, Northern England. In this modern-day folk tale, two brothers become terrorised by ghostly visions after bringing a pair of stone heads into their family home. Combining photographic documentation with personal archive material and dreamlike sequences, Hexham Heads reflects on the haunted nature of family photographs and domestic objects as vessels of trauma.
Three concentrated doses of cinematic pleasure. Artists in this programme meditate on storytelling and agency, synthesising practices of filmmaking and living to suggest new forms of intergenerational care. The ways we interpret our collective selves are explored through tender engagements with technologies of record and remembrance.
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Belgian filmmaker and cinematographer Fairuz Ghammam’s warm, generous work explores aspects of (auto)biography, shared authorship, and collaborative practices.
Staged as a walk through her hometown, Kortrijk, Culture riffs on these themes, sewing kernels of family history through a narrative, and a gaze, that oscillates between private and public space. How many memories and storylines can coexist?
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Films by Leonor Noivo and Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky
No human is an island. Two short films of grand vision—and great difference—follow their lone protagonists as they negotiate between inner and outer worlds. From the barren but hauntingly militaristic island of Lemnos to a verdant Portuguese forest, both humans rearrange fugitive blocks of cunning and experience to find their point of view.
Q&A with filmmakers Leonor Noivo, Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky
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Join Cowboy and Indian on their misadventures to the centre of the earth!
A Town Called Panic will be screened after school on Thursday at Kaleidoscope (59 Marygate). Places are free but should be booked via bfmaf.org or the Maltings Box Office.
