Filmmakers in Focus explores the corpus of works by filmmakers who have maintained a responsive and reflective relationship to the moment in which they are working. Drawing on underrepresented experiences, vital histories and moments that are in need of remembrance, these filmmakers offer a remarkable and enduring lens to our world. The 20th Edition welcomes programmes in celebration of the works of Ayanna Dozier and Eri Makihara.

We are pleased to also welcome filmmaker Philip Rizk with a curated Focus programme, Ways of Seeing Fanon. Frantz Fanon (1925-61) was a militant thinker, both in his capacity as a psychiatrist and as a member of the National Liberation Front in Algeria. Over 60 years after his death, it is about time we read Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in, Africa, and the Arabic-speaking region, the global neocolony.

Asking what it could mean to disentangle ourselves from the throes of that neocolonialism he saw so clearly in his time, the programme unfolds over the Festival weekend, featuring works by Raoul Peck, Assia Djebar, Moustapha Alassane, Victor Jara Collective and Philip himself.

Philip Rizk will be joined in conversation with Orsod Malik (Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation) and Mai Taha (Assistant Professor in Human Rights, LSE) on Saturday 29 March.

Ayanna Dozier is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. BFMAF presents a vast programme of shorts made between 2020 and 2024, exploring transactional intimacy, body labour and performance. Traversing sites for sex work and illicit sexual activity alongside an exploration into gendered, racialised bodies, her 16mm and 8mm films oscillate between impressions of soft-pornography and surveillance.

Ayanna will join us in conversation on Sunday 30 March.

Supported by the British Council, this retrospective programme of works by Japanese filmmaker Eri Makihara marks the first time her films are exhibited outside of Asia. With a focus on the physical sensations of people communicating primarily through sign language and other visual means, Makihara centres the experience of Deaf people within the dominant hearing culture and seeks to bring to light the social structure of our world, and its inherent oppressive mechanisms. The programme will feature a screening of Vive L’Amour (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan, 1994), an almost entirely silent film with themes of loneliness and a depiction of time that greatly influenced Makihara’s film The Tanaka Family (Japan, 2021) which will be screening at the Festival.

Eri’s films will screen on Friday 28 March followed by Q&As with BSL interpretation.