The Propositions strand 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.

This will include the UK Premiere of Emila Beatriz‘s barrunto (Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, 2024) by followed by a Q&A. The Margaret Tait Commission is a feature length speculative fiction that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now. It 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.

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 (United Kingdom, 2023) imagines the meeting, in 1940s London, 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.

Saturday’s event “For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch. What a bloody awful country” takes Home Secretary Reginald Maudling, quoted on his return from his first visit to Northern Ireland in 1970. The programme will showcase three films selected by writer and artist Maria Fusco: Elephant (United Kingom, 1989) by Alan Clarke, 16MM FILM RECORDED ON THE MELMOUNT ROAD, STRABANE, CO. TYRONE, NORTHERN IRELAND, 11TH JULY 2001 WITH FAST FORWARD AND SLOW MOTION SPEED CHANGES AUTHORED TO VHS BYTHE ROYAL ULSTER CONSTABULARY FOR THE PURPOSES OF PROSECUTION (Ireland, United Kingdom, 2012) by Alex Monteith and Easter 2016 (United Kingdom, 1982) by Ben Bolt. This event clashes together two BBC TV plays and an artist’s film to explore the ongoing legacies of censorship, voice and socio-cultural velocity with particular reference to the BBC’s broadcasting ban of 1988 to 1994 of Northern Irish (largely Nationalist) politicians.