Malena Szlam
MALENA SZLAM is a Chilean filmmaker based in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang. Through her practice, Szlam reimagines connections between human beings and the natural world. Attentive to how geopolitics are intertwined with natural phenomena—from moon’s orbital phases to the sweeping high-plateau of central Andes—her films, installations, and photographs explore embodied perception and the affective dimensions of analogue film processes. Her recent projects focus on geology, earth sciences, and volcanology. She has collaborated with composers and scientists, including Lawrence English, Clive Oppenheimer, and Susannah Buchan to create soundscapes that emanate from deep within the earth’s crust, the ocean, and the atmosphere.
Her films have been exhibited at festivals and museums, including TIFF, MoMA, New Directors/New Films Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Edinburgh International Festival, IFFR, CPH:DOX, and Jeonju IFF. Szlam’s 2018 film ALTIPLANO was awarded 25 FPS’s Grand Prix, Melbourne International Film Festival’s Best Experimental Short Film, Curtocircuíto’s Explora, and TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. Group exhibitions include “femmes volcans forêts torrents” at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and “The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
One of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest contributions to the photographic image were stereographs commissioned by the U.S. Army, capturing their war against the Modoc Tribe in Northern California. These stereographs, many of which were staged, are revisited here through violent collisions of image and sound – generating entangled histories of visual technology, genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations.
‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’ ~Wendy Clarke
Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them.
just above the tear duct on each side
A critical look at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the confluence of carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic incentives that determined their influence.
Over 100 filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
A song of the seasons in sign language, Makihara’s poetic documentary follows a group of deaf people who create visual musical space through motion and expression. A girl sings wind through the trees, a woman screams her soul to the sky, and a couple’s love ebbs with the rolling waves.
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Photographer and filmmaker Celeste Rojas Mugica confronts the political weight of images, revisiting her father’s photographic archive developed in exile in Latin America following activist involvement during the Pinochet dictatorship.
An evolving live video essay from Abiba Coulibaly exploring parallels, strains, convergences and ruptures in on-screen encounters between Black and Arab characters, and the off-screen realities from which they emerged.
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Join BFI NETWORK partners BFI Doc Society and Film Hub North for a tea or coffee, followed by a roundtable conversation where you can ask us anything about our film funds and talent development programmes.
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Two powerful, de-centering works from Eri Makihara that challenge the dominance of conventional cinematic forms and representations of disability.
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Melted into the Sun tells the story of Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th-century mystic and revolutionary from Khorasan who fought for a just society – questioning land extraction, hierarchy and property. Al-Muqanna’s proto-socialist ideas and magical practices have reverberated throughout the history of Central Asia.
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In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez’s late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent; the ‘fictions and fantasies that follow loss, allowing us to bear disappointment both as individuals and publics in times of national decline’
The second feature from acclaimed master of Taiwan’s Second New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang, follows three characters sharing a seemingly empty Taipei apartment…
Unfolding over a single night’s journey into morning, Nightshift (1981) distills the comings and goings of a hotel foyer into an eerie series of moods.
Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Friday night freak out with Junglehussi.
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A programme of new cinema inspired by the hallucinogenic properties of flowers, archival dissonance, and tales of a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.