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 2024 edition features the UK premiere of Emilia Beatriz‘s barrunto, And Let History Begin, a discursive event with Onyeka Igwe rehearsing new futures through radical theatre.

barrunto • Emilia Beatriz • Puerto Rico, United Kingdom • 72 mins • UK Premiere

Emilia Beatriz‘s barrunto (Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, 2024) is a feature length speculative fiction that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now. The film is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus. Through digital, archival and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto sensorially translates bodily unrest, forecasts, or omens via signals sensed in the environment.

Made in collaboration with Shanti LaLita, Claude Nouk, Alicia Matthews, Harry Josephine Giles, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, y muchxs más. Thanks to Screen Scotland and La Impresora.

A Margaret Tait Award 2020 Commission with support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

A Radical Duet • Dir Onyeka Igwe • United Kingdom • 2023 • 29 mins

Artist Onyeka Igwe will present And Let History Begin, a discursive event rehearsing new futures through radical theatre. Igwe’s recent film A Radical Duet (2023) imagines the 1940s London meeting of two anti-colonialist women who channel the revolutionary fervour and ideas of the time into writing a play. Following the screening, Onyeka Igwe invites the audience to take part in a communal reading and discussion of Maskarade (1973), a play by the Caribbean theorist, playwright, novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter whose biography and theorisations were vital in the development of this film and the larger research project which proposes storytelling as essential to imagining the world otherwise.