Payal Kapadia
Payal Kapadia (India) is a filmmaker and artist based in Mumbai. She studied Film Direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her work deals with that which is not easily visible, hidden somewhere in the folds of memory and dreams. It is between minor, ephemeral feminine gestures where she tries to find the truth that makes up her practice. In 2017, her film Afternoon Clouds premiered at Cannes film Festival in the Cinefondation selection; in 2018, her experimental documentary And What is the Summer Saying had its world premiere at the Berlinale Shorts. The latter went on to receive the Special Jury Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam the same year. Kapadia’s experimental short The Last Mango Before Monsoon premiered at Oberhausen International Film Festival in 2015, where she was awarded FIPRESCI Prize and Special Jury Prize. The film received other awards including Best Film and Best Editing at Mumbai International Film Festival in 2016 and Special Mention at Filmadrid. Currently, Payal is working on making her first feature film All We Imagine as Light, which she developed at the Cinefondation Cannes Residency between 2019-20 and is supported by the Hubert Bals Script and Project Development Fund.
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.
Curated by artist-filmmaker Gail Pickering, Unsettled Grounds brings together works by graduates of the Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, each engaging with landscapes in states of transformation—whether shaped by environmental change, personal histories, or industrial decline.
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On the centenary of the founding of the moving image, Sylvia Wynter gave a speech building on V.Y. Mudimbe’s critical observation of the occident’s violent act of “submitt[ing] the world to its memory” through image-making.
Assia Djebar, once Frantz Fanon’s collaborator at the National Liberation Front’s journal El Moudjahid, is a rarely recognised force reclaiming that memory through film.
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Part one of BFMAF Propositions programme looking at the work of artist, educator and activist Stuart Marshall. Stuart’s work challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, subverting and critiquing the prevailing language of television and news media.
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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.
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A hybrid, participatory movement and performance workshop developed by artist and PhD researcher Conal McStravick and Toronto/Tkaronto-based artist and community activist Mikiki based on the AIDS activist videos of Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Marshall’s videos bookend the propagation of an influential, intersectional mode of AIDS video activism, propagated through UK-Canada transnational video networks.
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Brooklyn-based artist-writer Ayanna Dozier works across film, performance, and installation using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods.
Her current research and artwork examines how transactional intimacy redistributes care from the private sector into public, social, and political relations.
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Tourism, war, and sunsets – films in this programme capture flows of life, the imprints we leave as we move and the many selves we encounter when we arrive.
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Departing from the Syrian Revolution, before moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy from 1936 Spain, Angola, and Palestine, to the Paris Commune, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts to dismantle the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.
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Join us for a special screening of Love Tapes recorded over the Festival. Love Tapes artist Wendy Clarke will also join collaborator Kim Coleman live online to discuss and answer questions from the audience on her Love Tapes project and their collaboration, Endless Love Tapes.
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Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.
A Love Tapes-themed night of dancing and karaoke to close out BFMAF25 in style! 🥳