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Educator and social theorist Tom Campbell joins us for a dynamic conversation on how disability is produced and reshaped by the transformations of modern society. Drawing on his forthcoming book Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence, Campbell mobilises Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of solid and liquid modernity to unpack the shifting forms of power, exclusion, and moral indifference that structure disabled lives today.
A kilted warrior crowns the New York skyline in this joyous tribute to Jesse Rae, a musician from the Scottish Borders who plugged into the electric current of Parliament-Funkadelic. From bringing 80s NYC to a standstill atop the Brooklyn Bridge to shaping seminal hits like Inside Out, Rae fused tartan swagger with transatlantic groove to craft a mythic, pluralist vision of Scotland in the key of funk!
Dub Epistemology is a series of hybrid talks and live audio essays by Ashley Holmes that treat sound as both archive and method—foregrounding movement, repetition, and re-performance as tools to imagine histories that circulate, mutate, and persist through listening, replay, and versioning.
Filmed in Angus, Scotland, Soft Fruit follows migrant seasonal workers on an industrial berry farm as they pick, prepare and transport crops. Candid conversations and scenes of rebellious, collective gathering appear alongside observational footage in shifting visual formats – from high-definition video to 16mm, and CGI inspired by medieval Islamic cosmography – building a layered sense of time and place.
An event series, resource and film library inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat. Join us throughout the festival as three artists from Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada hosted by BFMAF explore resilient LGBTQIA+ community led care.
A chance to drop-in, meet up and softly extend the themes of the project: community care, self care and palliative care as three pillars of care drawn by lgbtqia+ support groups and alternative healthcare. Pastries and tea included!
Documenting the landmark 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora, Shari Frilot’s seminal film captures a charged gathering of scholars, artists, and activists in dialogue. Through the voices of Essex Hemphill, Urvashi Vaid, Isaac Julien, and M. Jacqui Alexander and others, it crystallises a pivotal moment in diasporic queer history – interrogating Black and queer identity, media production, homophobia, and the contested terrain of Black nationalism.
A participatory workshop exploring grief, communitarian care, and ways of imaging what we might palliate – led by Toronto/Tkaranto–based artist and community activist Mikiki.
Collaging across media, performance and the archive, two films probe the architectures—material, political, and psychic—that shape Irish identity across borders. From a punative contemporary asylum system to the miasma of surveillance and hostility that shadowed Irish migrants to Britain in the 1970s and 80s, they expose a spectacle of belonging maintained and malformed by its systematic denial.
