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.

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.

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.

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.