Propositions 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. The 2025 programme features new work from Morgan Quaintance, what is possibly the first AIDS activist video in the global archive presented by Conal McStravick, and a hybrid talk and live video essay by Abiba Coulibaly.

Artist and researcher Conal McStravick curates an unmissable screening of Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) (Stuart Marshall, United Kingdom, Canada) a 1983 artist’s video on the subject of AIDS by the TV documentarian and gay rights activist Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Presumed lost and unseen for almost 40 years, this 25-minute video uses appropriated texts, critical cultural analysis and collaboration with an AIDS clinician. Marshall’s video constructs a compelling counter narrative to the mainstream and demonising media reporting of the time.

London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance presents the World Premiere of Available Light (United Kingdom, Japan, 2025). Developed by Quaintance with artist and sociologist Laura Harris in Tokyo. Kicking off an Outlands touring programme, 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.

Abiba Coulibaly 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.