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Programmes

4 March 2023

A presentation of Helena Solberg’s debut short films (1966-69) alongside her 1982 feature From the Ashes: Nicaragua Today which brings a multi-layered feminist perspective to a political and societal portrait of the country following the 1979 insurrection that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship. Her shorts, made during one of the most repressive moments of the Brazilian military dictatorship, examine the unliveable conditions experienced by communities under oppression and emphasise women’s agency as active protagonists in the living and telling of their own stories.

Run Time

95 mins
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5 March 2023

Personal, geological and collective histories are reencountered through this series of films. A reckoning is at the core of Myrid Carten’s candid portrait of familial ties in Sorrow had a baby. While the caverns of a corpse mountain become the place and wonder for a curious eye in Rita Morais’ 16mm film Há ouro em todo o lado, where a child’s play and voice relay sage observations of its past transformation. Afro-Diasporic underground disco, house and ballroom culture is source and inspiration for the blissful and rapturous worldmaking within India Sky Davis’ The Lifecycle of Rainbows.

Descendants is presented in collaboration with the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths University of London, selected by artist filmmaker and programme director Gail Pickering.

Run Time

60 mins
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3 March 2023

Three short works by young filmmakers in Berwick, made collaboratively with artists Kimberley O’Neill and Kathryn Elkin. Applying techniques of digital filmmaking and documentary storytelling, the films explore entangled relationships between people, technology and the local environment.

Run Time

60 mins
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3 – 5 March 2023  •  Free Entry

As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Aljafari takes the title from a short story by Borges and describes the work as a “cinematic self-portrait” – questioning our interpretation of screen violence, its relationship to real-world horrors, and troubling our positionality as spectators.

Director

Countries

Run Time

18 mins

Year

2022
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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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3 March 2023

The isolated mountainous region of Tusheti, in Northeast Georgia, is the site for a reflection on the importance of ritual, the maintenance of community ties, and how modernisation and migration are transforming rural landscapes. Shot over several years, Let Us Flow uses inovative audio-visual techniques to make visible the symbolic and physical division of sacred spaces within the community and offers a nuanced perspective on a culture where ancestral shrines are only accessible to men.

Director

Run Time

63 mins

Year

2022
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5 March 2023

An anthology of stories made collaboratively with the Nenets, an indigenous nomadic people of the Russian tundra under modern Communist rule. Beautifully composed from both archive material and cinematography, the film blends fiction and documentary to produce a vivid portrait of Nenets culture as told and performed by the people themselves. As the first feature film made in the Nenets language, Seven Songs makes an important contribution to contemporary indigenous cinema and a timely intervention into continuing calls for decolonization in Russia.

Country

Run Time

89 mins

Year

2000
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5 March 2023

An open discussion on the work of this year’s Filmmakers in Focus, Anastasia Lapsui & Markku Lehmuskallio with their close collaborator Johannes Lehmuskallio (co-director, cinematographer and actor), academic Caroline Damiens (Université Paris Nanterre), and BFMAF Programmer Herb Shellenberger. We will engage with the collaborative, “Fourth Cinema” approach to filmmaking taken up by Lapsui, Lehmuskallio and their collaborators which include Indigenous communities in regions of the Circumpolar North. The conversation will explore beyond the four titles in our retrospective, towards a richer picture of their filmmaking oeuvre and the politics and poetics of representation through hybrid forms of cinema.

Run Time

60 mins
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