Saturday 12 October
Sat. 12 October: 11 AM - 1 PM
1948 What We Knew (Jill Daniels, UK, 2024) 15m
Israelism (Sam Eilertsen and Eric Axelman. USA, 2023). 75m
1948 WHAT WE KNEW is an autobiographical documentary filmed on a smartphone in London at the start of the Israeli state's murderous attack on Gaza, three Jewish women of European heritage - Ruth, Gail and the director, all born in 1948, the same year as the Israeli state - discuss the (fairy) stories of empty deserts and false dreams of Jewish salvation we heard about Israel growing up. 1948 What We Knew paints a compelling portrait of contested Jewish identity.
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ISRAELISM explores how Israel is central to the political and cultural life of the American Jewish community. But it has also become a deeply divisive subject, as painful cracks have emerged within the Jewish community over the Israel-Palestine conflict, inspiring argument, protest and even censorship.
ISRAELISM explores the past, present and future of the relationship between American Jews and Israel. Dozens of American Jewish thinkers, community leaders and activists share stories of falling in love with Israel, and competing visions for a Jewish future, while Israelis and Palestinians describe how their lives are affected by the decisions of a community half a world away. Israelism asks how and why Israel became the cornerstone of American Judaism, what the consequences have been, and what will happen as divisions continue to grow.
Sat. 12 October: 2 PM - 4 PM
Union (Brett Story and Stephen Maing. USA, 2024). 102m
In a historic fight for better rights, employees at one of Amazon's gigantic warehouses in New York start the Amazon Labour Union (ALU), but they’re not just up against one of the tech industry’s most powerful giants with unlimited resources.
Grassroots activism lies at the heart of this involving film, which follows a group of people fighting for better working conditions at Amazon. An account of the formation of the first Amazon Labor Union, led by Chris Smalls, who quit over unsafe working conditions. The film bears witness to long, tense conversations between union organisers, which are intercut with recordings of conversations surreptitiously captured inside the facility and footage of activists´ arrests. In-fighting, personality clashes and class tensions – not to mention nasty union-busting tactics – threaten progress. The directors capture moments of landmark success, but the film makes clear that this is just the beginning of a long fight for the company’s 1.5 million employees.
Sat. 12 October: 5 PM - 7 PM
Britain's Forgotten Prisoners
(Martin Read. UK, 2024). 80m
With one public protection prisoner recently committing suicide after giving up hope of ever being released, this film is an urgent call for all imprisonment for public protection cases to be reviewed.
There are over three thousand forgotten prisoners languishing in jail in England and Wales, held indefinitely with no idea when they’ll be released, even though they completed their sentences years earlier. They’re IPP prisoners – people who were given an additional indeterminate sentence, Imprisonment for Public Protection.
Martin Read’s film looks at the punishment described by Conservative former Justice Minister Ken Clarke as ‘a stain on the Justice System’, following both the stories of individuals trapped in a Kafka-esque world of labyrinthine bureaucracy that has seen them swallowed up by a system, and those campaigning for their rights as human beings to have their lives returned to them.
Sat. 12 October: 8 PM - 11 PM
Open Country + Live music
(Glenda Drew and Jesse Drew. USA, 2024). 80m
Open Country is a journey into the roots of American Country music, reclaiming it as the creative musical expression of working people of all colors. Through archival clips, contemporary interviews, performances, and animated graphics, Open Country repositions country music into its rightful place as a people’s music.
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Although one wouldn’t realize it from listening to today’s pop Country-Western radio stations, country music has been anything but a rightwing soundtrack. To the contrary, the roots of Country and Western lie firmly in classic American traditions of resistance to capital, freedom from government interference, and in defense of the right of workers, poor farmers, and the dispossessed to live their lives in dignity.
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The evening will commence with a set from local fiddlers and pluckers Joe and The Temperance Two. The trio were brought together through a love of the fiddle tunes and string band music of Appalachia. Musicians Joe Mansfield (fiddle) and Kai Carter (guitars) were joined in 2021 by Yannick Allerton (a fresh ‘lock down’ adopter of claw-hammer banjo).
Sunday 13 October
Sun. 13 October: 1 PM - 3 PM
Prism
(Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam, An van Dienderen and Éléonore Yaméogo. Belgium, 2021). 78m
Among the many ways that racism is entrenched in film culture is a technical one: the lighting for movie cameras has always been calibrated for white skin, with other production tools reflecting the same bias throughout cinema history. Three filmmakers explore the literal, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of that reality. In a series of thematically linked, provocative discussions and interrogations, Eléonore Yameogo from Burkina Faso, Belgian An van. Dienderen, and Rosine Mbakam from Cameroon chart the making of their own film, while exploring the cinematic construction of whiteness and how this relates to power, privilege, and the myth of objectivity.
The differences in the skin color of the filmmakers serve as a starting point to explore their experiences with the biased limitations of the medium.
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PRISM creates powerful counterimages in a co-creative flow that connects documentary and fictional codes, to question the issue of racism in Western film making. The film problematizes the neutrality of the camera and its inequality of power to tackle other inequalities in society based on skin color. While the film deconstructs these issues, it also tries to reconstruct by creating a film in a collaborative manner.
Sun. 13 October: 4 PM - 6 PM
BRFF International Shorts
Our International showcase of short films returns once again.
This year we look at the trauma that follows the murder of a family member in Peru that remains shrouded in mystery and the rise to political activism after the killing of the sister of the protagonist by the LA police.
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We have a strong focus on Iran with two short fiction films focusing on the conditions of women in Iran and a re-imagining of the history of revolutionary Iran (the film includes brief images of animal cruelty).
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Poetry plays an important role in exploring illegal migration in the USA, in rebuilding memories of the Spanish Civil War and in a poetic look at the beautiful and famous Portuguese Cobblestones whose maintenance clashes with the neoliberal city.
We also explore the history of the Keffiyeh and the limits of personal space and consent in public spaces (the right to take photographs of passers-by) and around consent in digital spaces, more specifically around unsoliciated nude images.
Sun. 13 October: 7 PM - 9 PM
Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always
(Eliza Hittman. USA, 2020). 95m
Her journey, her choice. A portrayal of a 17 year old in rural Pennsylvania. Faced with the terrifying realities of an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support in rural USA Autumn will embark in a journey, alongside her cousin Skylar, across state lines to New York City on a fraught journey to get an abortion.
Even before the current attack on reproductive rights in the USA and the rest of the world, the film presents a matter-of-fact portrait of two young women in a difficult but all-too-believable situation.
“[The] hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation” (NY Times).