The Propositions programme is a discursive setting for filmmakers to expand on their work, demonstrating research, contexts and perspectives as a means to dig deeper into the questions, ideas and complications encountered through the filmmaking process.

Conal McStravick will be presenting a programme of two works drawing on depictions of death and illness utilising personal archive, phone conversations, and appropriated texts by the TV documentarian and gay rights activist Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). The film programme will be followed by a workshop exploring ideas of surveillance, cruising, self care and touch as queer methodology.

London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance presents the UK Premiere of Available Light (United Kingdom, Japan, 2025). Kicking off an Outlands touring programme, and developed with artist and sociologist Laura Harris in Tokyo, Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Through interviews with workers at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum and fragments of conversations with renters of both Tokyo and London, the film instigates a dialogue between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Laura and Morgan.

Abiba Coulibaly is a film curator with a background in critical geography and founder of Brixton Community Cinema and Atlas Cinema, two experiments in what democratising access to cinema could look like. She will present Black and Arab Encounters on Screen, a hybrid talk and live video essay exploring parallels, strains, convergences and ruptures in on-screen encounters between Black and Arab characters, and the off-screen realities from which they emerged.