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Programmes

7 March 2024

Full of ghosts and memories, Ghassan Salhab’s debut feature film is set in the late 1980s, towards the end of Lebanon’s Civil War. Protagonist Khalil returns to Beirut under a new identity, and to a confrontation with those he left behind following his apparent death a decade earlier. Featuring documentary elements and interviews with the lead actors, Phantom Beirut is a haunting exploration of the official silences and collective amnesias that stalk the lives of those who live through conflict.

Director

Countries

Run Time

121 mins

Year

1998
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8 March 2024

Nadia El Fani’s pre-Jasmin Revolution espionage fable follows our hero Kalt as she hijacks the airwaves to broadcast political messages from a remote mountain village in Tunisia. Things quickly turn into a sexually charged game of cat-and-mouse with French intelligence officer Julia as the pair struggle with oppositional missions. Brimming with queer and revolutionary potential Bedwin Hacker is keenly critical of the security apparatus of the French state and its targeting of immigrant communities.

Director

Countries

Run Time

107 mins

Year

2003
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9 March 2024

Nelson Yeo’s beautifully restrained debut feature portrays a complex love triangle of fantasy and desire between three old friends unexpectedly reunited in their middle age. Owing something to the dreamy poetics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a journey rooted in the real gently blooms into a moving and unexpected reflection on the porous boundaries between worlds; touching on issues of ageing, ecological collapse, mature sexuality, and mythology.

Director

Countries

Run Time

78 mins

Year

2023
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9 March 2024

An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films, considering environmental grief, care and survival strategies in difficult times – and the flexible binary between who/what and how/where we nurture.

Join us and the Southern Uplands Partnership in an expansive conversation.

Director

Country

Run Time

15 mins

Year

2022
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10 March 2024

An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films considering what and who we feel responsible for, where a sense of duty lies, and whether this is individual or collectively shared?

With the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment Association, who will be bringing their own converted cine film material, alongside the Northumberland Archives footage of border regiments.

Run Time

60 mins
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9 March 2024

Marking the centenary of her birth, BFMAF presents a new restoration of the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius, one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors. The tenacious Valentina, recently freed from prison in Soviet Russia, heads back to her native Estonia on a quest to find her son Jüri. A Stolen Meeting touches on powerful themes of migration, rootlessness, reconciliation and motherhood at the end of the Soviet Era.

Director

Country

Run Time

101 mins

Year

1988
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3 – 5 March 2023  •  Free Entry

Belgian filmmaker and cinematographer Fairuz Ghammam’s warm, generous work explores aspects of (auto)biography, shared authorship, and collaborative practices.

Staged as a walk through her hometown, Kortrijk, Culture riffs on these themes, sewing kernels of family history through a narrative, and a gaze, that oscillates between private and public space. How many memories and storylines can coexist?

Director

Country

Run Time

14 mins

Year

2022
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