A Relaxed Screening of this programme will take place simultaneously at Berwick Town Hall Council Chamber.
Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar are BFMAF26 Filmmakers in Focus, with post-screening conversations faciltated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Sanghita Sen is a film and cultural studies scholar and a documentary filmmaker with a background in English & comparative literature, and Linguistics. She completed her second PhD in Film Studies—centred on the Bengali cinema of the 1970s—at the University of St. Andrews before joining the University of Northumbria in 2023. Field work undertooken for the thesis paved the way for a feature length documentary on Ritwik Ghatak, the Bengal Partition, and refugee crisis. Whilst subsequent research interests have widened to include tricontinental political cinema and its facilitation of cultural encounters between filmmakers from the Global South.
The programme is supported by Midnight’s Third Child through the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme.
Dadu
An intimate, observational portrait of Momin Ali Mridha, a centenarian and long-time model at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka University. Through his reflections on politics, religion, class, creativity, and human kindness the film blooms into a luminous meditation on the shifting character of Bangladesh and the beauty of everyday life.
Grace
Grace emerges from Naeem Mohaiemen’s collaboration with Maine resident Karen Wentworth, the second person in the state to legally secure medicine for a dignified end-of-life process. Documenting her daily routines, the film offers a tender and hopeful reflection on autonomy and mortality while posing the question: What does it mean to accept a body’s decline?