Bristol Radical Film Festival 2025
4 & 5 October 2025
2025 Programme Summary
Saturday
11AM -1PM: Miners' Strike. A Frontline Story
2PM-4PM: London Recruits
5PM-7PM: The Diary of a Sky + Return to Al-Ma'in
8PM-10.30PM: Fanon
Sunday
1PM -3PM: Censoring Palestine
4PM-6PM: International Short Film Showcase
7PM-9.00PM: Sudan, Remember Us
Bristol Radical Film Festival 2025 Programme
Saturday 4
Among other events, the film retells the events of 18 June 1984, the Battle of Orgreave. We hear how pickets thought it strange that they were allowed by the police to line up outside a coking works that had been identified as crucial to the government’s effort to break the strikes. Then they found out why. The unusually heavy police presence turned on the striking workers, charging them with horses and meting out extreme violence.
Saturday 4
11AM - 1PM
Miners Strike. A Frontline Story
(Ben Anthony, 2024, UK. 88m)
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This documentary tells the story of this year-long conflict by combining archive footage with deeply personal testimony from striking and working miners, their families and the police - with many speaking for the first time.
Among other events, the film retells the events of 18 June 1984, the Battle of Orgreave. We hear how pickets thought it strange that they were allowed by the police to line up outside a coking works that had been identified as crucial to the government’s effort to break the strikes. Then they found out why. The unusually heavy police presence turned on the striking workers, charging them with horses and meting out extreme violence.
2PM - 4PM
London Recruits
(Gordon Main, 2024, UK. 104m)
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South Africa, 1970. Imprisoned, tortured, killed - the racist, apartheid regime has all but annihilated oposition inside the country. It seems that all hope for liberation is at an end.
In exile, Oliver Tambo initiates a secret plan. He sends young freedom fighter Ronnie Karrils to London. From eight thousand miles away, Ronnie is tasked with convincing the apartheid authorities and the oppressed population that hope lives on and that ANC units are still operating inside South Africa.
With almost no budget, Ronnie and a small cell of fellow exiles turn to the ordinary young people of London for help. So begins a series of ever more daring undercover missions that send shock waves through the regime.
A potent mix of never before seen archive footage, action packed drama and candid testimony from the recruits, eyewitnesses and secret police - London Recruits is a compelling journey into the heart of apartheid South Africa.
5PM - 7PM
The Diary of a Sky
(Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2024, Lebanon. 44m)
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Return to Al-Ma'In
(Forensic Architecture, 2025, UK. 31m)
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​THE DIARY OF A SKY
The Diary of a Sky unfolds an atmospheric symphony of violence over Beirut, revealing the haunting fusion of incessant Israeli military flights and the hum of generators during blackouts. This 45-minute video essay plunges viewers into a chilling chronicle of daily life transformed by the weaponization of the air, where the terror of repeated incursions becomes a disconcertingly banal backdrop.
​The Diary of a Sky reveals Beirut’s eerie contrast – generator hums entwined with Israeli military flights.This video essay captures the atmospheric monotony, where terror seamlessly integrates into daily life.
RETURN TO AL-MA'IN
Al-Ma’in was the birthplace of Salman Abu Sitta (b. 1937), the foremost chronicler of the ongoing Nakba and an advocate for the Palestinian right of return. From his home in Kuwait, and from the offices of the Palestine Land Society in Beirut and London, Salman has dedicated his life to compiling a comprehensive Atlas of Palestine. His research on the history of his hometown was published in his memoir Mapping my Return. FA (Forensic Architecture) had previously worked with Salman to locate a mass grave in the Palestinian village of al-Dawayima, on the western slopes of the Hebron Mountains. For this investigation, Salman and FA researchers digitally reconstructed the village of al-Ma’in and the events of 13-14 May 1948 within an immersive 3D environment, using our bespoke interviewing technique of ‘situated testimony’.
8PM - 10.30PM
Fanon
(Jean-Claude Barny, 2024, France. 132m)
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Born on the island of Martinique under French colonial rule, Frantz Omar Fanon (1925–1961) was one of the most important writers in black Atlantic theory in an age of anti-colonial liberation struggle. His work drew on a wide array of poetry, psychology, philosophy, and political theory, and its influence across the global South has been wide, deep, and enduring. His participation in the Algerian revolutionary struggle shifted his thinking from theorizations of blackness to a wider, more ambitious theory of colonialism, anti-colonial struggle, and visions for a postcolonial culture and society.
In the film, Frantz Fanon has just been appointed chef medical officer at the psychiatric hospital of Blida, in Algeria. Very soon, the innovative methods and the humanistic treatment he gives to Algerian patients attracts him the wrath of his colleagues and the director of the institution. However Frantz Fanon is not a man who lets be stepped on. His determination and his ideas generates interest of FLN and his leader Abane Ramdane, who offers to join the cause. In a context where tensions between the French army and FLN are becoming increasingly evident, Frantz Fanon sounds like a traitor. With his wife Josie, they are caught in a vortex of violence which lead them to take up the cause for the independance of Algeria.
Sunday 5
1PM - 3PM
Censoring Palestine
(Chris Reeves, 2025, UK. 95m)
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Terrible things are happening in Palestine, but the newspapers and TV don’t tell us the truth. Even social media is censored. In the streets, in education, on stage and screen, speaking out is not allowed. People face dawn raids, arrest, detention. Dissent has been criminalised.
Veteran film director Ken Loach describes how our mass media is being manipulated. The BBC, he says, is an arm of the state.
Students tell of brutal treatment at the hands of the police for daring to protest. Women speak out against the outrageous imprisonment of their daughters for taking action to stop drones killing innocent people. Idealistic protesters are being branded terrorists.
Horrifying pictures show the war crimes being committed which our TV and newspapers won’t report. Even the most peaceful demonstrations against the genocides come under fire as the police crack down on a national march and make multiple arrests including one of the organisers.
With powerful testimony from those who have been silenced, the film tells the story of the most outrageous attack on freedom of speech in modern times — a concerted establishment effort to hide a genocide.
With Ken Loach • Alexei Sayle • Jackie Walker • Roger Waters • Sarah Wilkinson • Peter Oborne • Ben Jamal • Lindsey German and many more.
4PM - 6PM
BRFF International Short Film Showcase
(Various. 120m)
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Our annual INTERNATIONAL SHORT-FILM SHOWCASE brings to attention the multiple and varied ways in which filmmakers from around the world reflect the world around us. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious but always challenging and innovative, this year's selection cover a wide variety of formats: from video-essays or experimental works to straightforward documentaries or fiction. From animation to music videos. Filmmakers explore the possibilities of film to engage the audience in thought and reflection.
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7PM - 9PM
Sudan, Remember Us
(Hind Meddeb, 2024, France, Tunisia, Qatar. 76m)
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In a Sudan torn apart by years of war, become immersed in the daily fight of young Sudanese activists, yearning for freedom and reform. Both harrowing and rousing, their fight reminds us of the human ability to find hope in the most oppressive of circumstances. ‘Sudan, Remember Us’ bears witness to a lost revolution and within it unearths a tribute to the power of creativity as a tool of survival and resistance.
In 2019, documentary filmmaker Hind Meddab flew to Sudan to film a sit-in protest at the Army headquarters in Khartoum. The people of Sudan were assembling, demanding reform after decades of military dictatorship. There she met a selection of young activists that she would continue to film over the course of 4 years, from the swell of hope and accomplishment following dictator Omar al-Bashir’s fall to the oppression of the military crackdown and subsequent civil war, which today, leaves Sudan in ruins. Standing in front of a powerful army, how could the civilian movement find the strength to persist? In conversations, in demonstrations, on walls, it emerges how the Sudanese tradition for poetry becomes a powerful tool for activism. Art, music and poetry bolster every stage of the Sudanese fight for freedom. ‘Sudan, Remember Us’ bears witness to a lost revolution and within it unearths a tribute to the power of creativity as a tool of survival and resistance.