Philip Rizk
Philip Rizk is a filmmaker and writer from Cairo living in Berlin. In his films, he experiments with methods of “making the habitual strange.” In Out on the Street (2015), he uses performance. In his found footage films Mapping Lessons (2020) and Terrible Sounds & Wonderful Things (2022, work in progress), he experiments with the technique of montage. In a world that is breaking down, a question that runs throughout Rizk’s projects is: “How do we prepare ourselves for what is to come?” He is a member of the Mosireen video collective behind the archive 858.ma. His texts include the essay “2011 is not 1968: a letter to an onlooker,” and the co-authored book (with Jasmina Metwaly) On Trials: A Manual on the Theatre of Law (Archive Books, 2021). He occasionally teaches in classrooms and workshops. His work can be followed @ filfilfilm.com.
Bio published at https://cimam.org/philip-rizk/
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.
Run Time
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.
Run Time
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.
Run Time
Two powerful, de-centering works from Eri Makihara that challenge the dominance of conventional cinematic forms and representations of disability.
Run Time
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.
Run Time
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.
Run Time
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.