Sheffield DocFest 2021 Festival Catalogue

Festival Catalogue

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Contents Welcome Introduction Juries & Awards

05 08 12

Opening Film Closing Film International Competition UK Competition Special Screenings Into The World Rebellions Rhyme & Rhythm Ghosts & Apparitions Northern Focus Retrospective

34 35 36 48 64 68 82 98 116 146 152

Arts Programme DocFest Exchange Community Programme Workshops Talks Partner Showcases & Events Sales Contacts Festival Info Staff & Contributors Index

184 210 218 222 228 230 236 240 246

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Contents

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Welcome

When author Kazuo Ishiguro gave his Nobel Lecture in 2017, he made the following observation: “Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings – that they appeal to what we share as human beings across our borders and divides. There are large glamorous industries around stories: the book industry, the movie industry, the television industry, the theatre industry.

But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: ‘This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?’”

After the seismic year that we have all experienced his quote resonates with me more 5

Welcome

than ever. As I review the range of documentary stories that the Festival Director, Cíntia Gil and the whole festival team have curated for the 2021 Sheffield DocFest, I am pleasantly reminded of how special this documentary genre is, and of how, as Ishiguro says of stories, they can connect people.

The films and art pieces presented this year are refreshingly wide-ranging in form, tone, viewpoint, authorship, style and substance.

Thank you, as ever, to the filmmakers and artists who are trusting us with their work. Thank you to all our sponsors and partners; your unwavering loyalty and support is deeply appreciated.

Thank you to all the trustees who have given their precious time to the festival year-round. Thank you to the extended family of industry advisors who have continued to produce talks and sessions.

And enormous thanks to Cíntia Gil, and all the festival staff, consultants, freelancers, and volunteers who have brought you this event despite facing enormous challenges as a result of the pandemic.

Some festival audiences will be able to enjoy events and screenings in Sheffield itself, and some will be able to attend a number of cinema screenings in cities nationally as we try to bring the festival to you. Others will be able to join us from far and wide online; a more globally democratic participation, perhaps?

Beyond the films and artworks, we hope the market will create opportunities for future 6

Sheffield DocFest 2021

work and support stories yet to be told, and that some newly launched initiatives will accelerate and spotlight new voices. As ever, we hope to be a forum for debates that matter.

So, I hope that DocFest goes some way to making us stronger again as a community, when isolation, disruption and loss have been such ongoing themes.

And no matter how you ‘fest’, I hope you feel welcome, I hope you meet new people who may become friends for life, and I hope you gain creative energy to propel you forward for your next projects and collaborations. But mostly I hope you enjoy the work, are moved by it, and feel and understand what all these special storytellers are trying to tell us.

— Alex Cooke, Chair of The Board of Trustees

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Welcome

Introduction

When my father died of a heartbreak he told me to never give up on this city for no first love kills with a dagger.

– Amina Atiq, ‘Backbencher’

June 2021. More than a year has passed since going to the cinema ceased being an ordinary habit. Since we were no longer able to come together in this way, to build a sense of community, to celebrate the art of filmmaking, to discuss the world and our lives, and to resist individualistic forms of cultural and social life. More than a year 8

Sheffield DocFest 2021

has passed since we were invaded by fear, loss, and isolation. And yet, so many people have, collectively, fought for what needs to be fought for: a better future, through justice, truth, equality, and respect for everyone. Community is not about the norms we impose on ourselves: it is about our capacity to think and act for the sake of those whose names we do not know. It is about our capacity to not give up on our humanity, even though it so often breaks our hearts.

Sheffield DocFest comes from this energy.

It is built by a team of people who passionately believe that sharing films and art with everyone else is a way of working toward a better city, and a better world. It comes from the tradition of a city that has always been there for those who wanted to be welcomed. Sheffield DocFest celebrates film and arts by honouring this spirit, and creating a collective space that is both relevant and generous to those who want to be a part of it, whether in Sheffield, online, or throughout the country.

This year’s festival can be lived through like a story: one that starts with the energy and empowerment depicted in Summer of Soul by Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and takes us to the intimacy and generosity of Mark Cousins’ The Story of Looking. The first film portrays a collective event and movement that gave more air to breathe, hope, and a sense of belonging to those who were so often forgotten or shut-out.

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Introduction

The second, meanwhile, emerges from isolation, from a deeply personal space, and calls for togetherness through the capacity we all have to open our eyes and hearts to new images, and to the new possibilities of emotional discovery therein. These two moments encapsulate what we have tried to build in our film programmes.

This year, we have also organised the festival programme in a way that clarifies its position towards both its public and industry audience and attendees. We want to simultaneously support and nourish talent, and those who work in the film industry, while giving our audiences a rich and varied artistic programme. We also want to strengthen our bonds with our Sheffield audiences, and with our city, by opening opportunities for different forms of engagement with the festival.

Outside of DocFest’s ten day run, we will continue to offer a variable, year-round programme in Sheffield, because we believe that film and arts should help everyone to feel connected, heard, and – hopefully – liberated, beyond a festival’s lifespan. This year, we are also carrying the energy and spirit of Sheffield to different parts of the UK, by bringing DocFest to cinemas nationwide: by doing this, we can share the programme with everyone who wants to engage with it, while simultaneously helping venues to rebuild audiences and reconnect with a community of film-lovers.

Once again, we have worked with extraordinary 10

Sheffield DocFest 2021

partners and sponsors who have supported this festival in times of unprecedented uncertainty.

We thank you not just in our names, but in the name of culture. In order to resist the haunting threads of injustice and violence, and of authoritarianism and a lack of transparency, we need support in the creation of spaces where people can be invited to think together. This is a process of building democracy, and participation; it is about providing scrutiny, and empowering critique. Thank you for your care.

I would like to dedicate this edition to its team: a group of dedicated people – some with long histories with Sheffield DocFest, others newcomers – who have not only built this festival but have supported each other during hard times.

I am in awe of your strength and passion, and deeply thankful.

Finally, I would like to thank Amina Atiq, a British-Yemeni poet who I have discovered in one of the films in this programme (thank you, always, for films and what they bring to us) and who has inspired these words. I hope her writing can resonate with all those who are fighting for community: never give up on this city.

— Cíntia Gil, Festival Director

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Introduction

Juries & Awards

Audience Award Supported by PBS America.This award is voted for by the Sheffield DocFest cinema audiences, recognising the film that receives the highest audience vote during the Festival.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

International Competition Singular films from all over the world, driven by courageous and creative ways of reflecting life and imagining our times.

Inti Briones Inti Briones (1971, Peru) is a cinematographer and producer, best known for his work with different Latin American filmmakers such as Raúl Ruiz, José Luis Torres Leiva, Ignacio Agüero, Cristián Jiménez, Alejandro Fernández Almendras, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, Walter Salles, Marcela Said and the renowned Peruvian director Melina León for their film Song Without a Name. Settled in Chile, he learned from veteran Chilean filmmakers, including Héctor Ríos, Ignacio Agüero and Raúl Ruiz. In 1996, he was named one of Variety magazine’s ‘10 Cinematographers to Watch’.

With approximately 43 feature films between fiction and documentary, he has appeared in two Brazilian TV series, Menina Sem Qualidades for MTV and Hebe, for Globo / Globo Play TV.

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Juries & Awards

Karen Alexander Karen Alexander is an independent film and moving image curator and researcher. She has worked with and for the Royal College of Art and the British Film Institute. She has been a guest for a wide range of cultural institutions and art galleries, including Iniva, the Watershed Bristol, Up Projects, Tate, Autograph and the Serpentine Gallery. She has lectured and spoken widely about film, race and representation, and her areas of research are UK artists’ film and video, and feminist and post-colonial politics of representation and gender. She co-founded Philomela’s Chorus, a moving image commissioning and exhibition platform for women of colour. Karen has recently joined the board of Longplayer and is a tutor at Central St Martins, University of the Arts.

Paula Gaitán Paula Gaitan is a Colombian-Brazilian filmmaker. She started as art director of the Cinema Novo classic The Age of the Earth (A Idade da Terra, Glauber Rocha,1978) and directed her first feature, Uaká, ten years later.

Since then, she has directed dozens of feature films, videos, television series and installations, including Subtle Interferences (2016), about the work of musician Arto Lindsay, Light in The Tropics (Forum/Berlinale 2020) and “é rocha e rio, Negro Leo” (Riverock) – shown at Sheffield DocFest. At the moment, Paula is working in a new film about Ken Jacobs. Having a constant interest in the work of other artists, Paula has filmed people such as Eliane Radigue, Maria Gladys, Agnes Varda, Matana Roberts, Marcelia Cartaxo, Lygia Pape, Renato Berta, Arrigo Barnabé, Elza Soares and Negro Leo.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sergio Fant Sergio Fant is a German-based Italian film programmer.

After graduating in film studies and training at Cineteca di Bologna, he went on to conceive and curate programmes for, among others, Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, the Rome Film Fest and the Venice International Film Festival. He has been the Trento Film Festival’s Head of Program since 2012. In 2013 he joined the Locarno Festival as programmer, holding the position until 2018. In 2019, he co-curated the 18th DocPoint - Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, and joined the Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival selection committee. He co-founded and runs the Italian film programming and distribution platform CineAgenzia, and writes a column on documentaries for the Italian weekly Internazionale.

TASAKA Hiroko Curator of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and Artistic Director of the Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions 2022. Born in Tokyo. TASAKA’s main projects include “Quest for Vision Vol.5 - Spelling Dystopia” (2012-13), “Shiro Takatani: La Chambre Claire” (2013-14), “Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Ghosts in the Darkness” (2016-17), “Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited” (2017), “exonemo: UN-DEAD-LINK” (2020) and the Second to 13th Yebisu International Festivals for Art & Alternative Visions (2009-21).

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Juries & Awards

Nominated Films

Charm Circle Nira Burstein / USA / 2021 / 79’ / World Premiere / English

Rancho Pedro Speroni / Argentina / 2021 / 72’ / International Premiere / Spanish

Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions / Niju no machi / Kotaichi no uta o amu Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi / Japan / 2020 / 78’ / International Premiere / Japanese

Summer / ЛЕТО Vadim Kostrov / Russia / 2020 / 109’ / World Premiere / Russian

Equatorial Constellations Silas Tiny / Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe / 2021 / 106’ / World Premiere / Igbo, Portuguese Factory to the Workers / Tvornice Radnicima Srđan Kovačević / Croatia / 2021 / 105’ / World Premiere / Croatian

This Stained Dawn Anam Abbas / Pakistan / 2021 / 89’ / World Premiere / English, Urdu White on White / Bílá na Bílé Viera Čákanyová / Czech Republic, Slovakia / 2020 / 74’ / International Premiere / English, Slovak

From The 84 Days / Aus den 84 Tagen Philipp Hartmann / Bolivia, Germany / 2021 / 105’ / World Premiere / German, Spanish My Dear Spies / Mes chers espions Vladimir Léon / France / 2020 / 134’ / UK Premiere / French, Russian Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land is Our Land! / Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra é Nossa!

Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero / Brazil / 2020 / 70’ / International Premiere / Maxakali, Portuguese 16

Sheffield DocFest 2021

UK Competition Bringing together diverse films with the UK as the main country of production into a contemporary conversation, championing and spotlighting artists and filmmakers with fresh perspectives on the world, and on cinema.

Ashley Clark Ashley Clark is the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. Previously, he worked as director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and he has curated film series at BFI Southbank, the Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, among other venues. He has contributed writing to publications including Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound, and the Guardian.

His first book is Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2015).

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Juries & Awards

Campbell X Campbell X has directed the award-winning queer urban romantic comedy feature film STUD LIFE, voted by the Guardian as one of the top 10 Black British feature films ever made. It was also in Vogue magazine as one of the best films in 2020. Campbell was one of the writers at the Royal Court for ‘My White Best Friend’ theatre series, directed and produced the short film DES!RE, and the documentary VISIBLE which headlined the Scottish Queer IFF in 2018. Campbell directed the award-winning TV webseries DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS and is one of the directors of the transgender webseries SPECTRUM LONDON. Campbell is the Co-founder with Neelu Bhuman of Wahala Film Fund, for short films by and about QTIPOC people.

Keiko SEI Keiko Sei is a writer, curator and media activist. After working as a video/media curator in Japan, she moved to Eastern Europe in 1988 to research media situations in the region and started numerous projects including ‘The Media Are With Us!: The Role of Television in the Romanian Revolution’ (Budapest, 1990), ‘Eastern Europe TV & Politics’ (Buffalo New York, 1993), ‘lantern magique – artistes tchéques et nouvelles technologies’ (Strasbourg, 1998), ‘POLITIK-UM/New Engagement’, (Prague, 2002), and ‘Re-designing East’, (Stuttgart, Gdansk, Budapest, Seoul, 2009-2013). In 2002 she moved to Southeast Asia to research media situations in the region. In Myanmar she started a film workshop and scholarship program with a cooperation from FAMU and co-founded Wathann Film Festival/ Institute in Yangon.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Leonor Teles Born in Vila Franca de Xira in the outskirts of Lisbon (1992). In 2016, Leonor’s second short BATRACHIAN’S BALLAD won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale Shorts and the Firebird Award in Hong Kong IFF. In 2018, her first documentary feature TERRA FRANCA won the SCAM International Award at Cinéma du Réel, Best First Feature at Mar del Plata and Best Documentary at Malaga IFF. In 2019, her short DOGS BARKING AT BIRDS had its world premiere in Venice Orizzonti Competition and was nominated for the European Film Awards.

Leonor is preparing her first feature film, UK KEI, winner of the Macao Spirit Award at IFFAM Project Market 2019, selected for Torino ScriptLab 2020 and EAVE 2020. Leonor also works as a cinematographer.

Wood Lin Born in 1981, he received his MA from the Graduate Institute of Sound and Image Studies at Tainan National University of the Arts. He is a film critic and a festival organiser specialising in documentary, and served as a juror in many international film festivals, like DokuFest, DMZ, IFF Rotterdam, the Golden Horse Awards. He has served as programme director of Taiwan International Documentary Festival (TIDF) since 2013 and now is the programme advisor of International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).

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Juries & Awards

Nominated Films

Ali and his Magical Sheep Maythem Ridha / Iraq, UK / 2021 / 25’ / World Premiere / Arabic Alive Makeda Matheson / UK / 2021 / 11’ / World Premiere / English CAUGHT / CAER Nicola Mai / UK / 2021 / 61’ / European Premiere / English, Spanish Cold Stack Frank Martin / UK / 2020 / 12’ / World Premiere / English Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8 Daniel Draper, Allan Melia / UK / 2021 / 89’ / World Premiere / English In The Space You Left Christine Saab / UK / 2021 / 23’ / World Premiere / English

RIP SENI Daisy Ifama / UK / 2021 / 20’ / World Premiere / English Songs For The River Charlotte Ginsborg / UK / 2021 / 77’ / World Premiere / English The Battle of Denham Ford Bradley & Bradley / UK / 2021 / 27’ / World Premiere / English The Elvermen Isla Badenoch / UK / 2021 / 14’ / World Premiere / English The Quintessence Pamela Breda / France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA / 2021 / 108’ / World Premiere / English, French The Return Eriberto Gualinga / Ecuador, UK / 2021 / 17’ / World Premiere / Kichwa

Madness Remixed Rhea Storr / UK / 2021 / 11’ / World Premiere / English Portrait Of Kaye Ben Reed / UK / 2021 / 59’ / World Premiere / English 20

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Tim Hetherington Award Supported by Dogwoof.

This award recognises a film and filmmaker which best reflects journalist Tim Hetherington’s legacy.

Ephraim Asili Ephraim Asili (USA) was educated in film and video arts, receiving a BA from Temple University and an MA from Bard College. As filmmaker, DJ and radio presenter, he focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His films have been shown worldwide at festivals. Asili is full-time artist in residence at Bard College in New York, where he is also assistant professor of Film and Electronic Arts. His latest film, The Inheritance, is presented at Sheffield DocFest 2021, in the film strand Rebellions.

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Juries & Awards

George Amponsah George Amponsah is a multiple award winning BAFTA nominated filmmaker who first started taking pictures in the 1980s as a photographer and Super 8mm film enthusiast. George’s most recent directing work is Black Power, a 90 minute film exec produced by Steve McQueen for the BBC. Black Power examines how the British Black Power moment came into being in the late 1960s and fought against police brutality and racism. 2019 saw George working as director on Enslaved – an inspirational six-part documentary series (BBC2) hosted by Academy Award nominated actor Samuel L. Jackson that brings home the horror of slavery to the world through underwater archaeology. George’s feature-length documentary The Hard Stop was nominated for a BAFTA in 2017 in the Outstanding Debut category.

Pooja Rangan Pooja Rangan is an Associate Professor of English in Film & Media Studies at Amherst College. She researched and writes about the humanitarian preoccupations of contemporary documentary culture, as they intersect with and open onto questions of voice, listening, accent, and disability. During 202021 Pooja is an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow in Residence at NYU’s Center for Media, Culture, and History, and an affiliate at NYU’s Center for Disability Studies.

She is also at work on two collaborative projects: an anthology of essays titled Thinking with an Accent, and Abolition Documentary, a collaboration with director Brett Story. Pooja serves on the advisory boards of a number of documentary publications and organizations, and has served as Board President of Flaherty from 2018-2020.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Nominated Films

Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight Nick Green / France, Lebanon, UK / 2021 / 99’ / World Premiere / English, French, Japanese

The Silence of The Mole / El silencio del Topo Anais Taracena / Guatemala / 2021 / 93’ / European Premiere / Spanish

Courage Aliaksei Paluyan / Belarus, Germany / 2021 / 89’ / UK Premiere / Belarusian, Russian Dear Elnaz Mania Akbari / Canada / 2021 / 83’ / UK Premiere / Farsi Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land is Our Land! / Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra é Nossa!

Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero / Brazil / 2020 / 70’ / International Premiere / Maxakali, Portuguese Splinters / Esquirlas Natalia Garayalde / Argentina / 2020 / 70’ / UK Premiere / Spanish The Monopoly of Violence / Un pays qui se tient sage David Dufresne / France / 2020 / 87’ / UK Premiere / French The Return: Life After ISIS Alba Sotorra Clua / Spain, UK / 2021 / 85’ / European Premiere / English 23

Juries & Awards

First Feature Award & Short Film Award

Agustina Comedi Agustina Comedi is a screenwriter and filmmaker. She studied Modern Literature. In 2017 her first film Silence is a Falling Body premiered at IDFA. The film was multi-awarded and selected in more than 50 international festivals. Her first short film Playback (2019) received the Best Short Film Award at Mar del Plata IFF, was part of Berlinale Short Film Competition where it got the Teddy Award. Playback has participated in more than 70 festivals including Jeonju IFF, Sheffield DocFest and New Directors/New Films at Lincoln Center. She is currently working on her next film.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Alisa Lebow Alisa Lebow is a documentary filmmaker, scholar, and writer, holding a doctorate in Cinema Studies from New York University. She teaches both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in film studies at the University of Sussex, UK, and conducts research that explores the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in documentary film and related media.

She has written extensively on first person film as a culturally and ideologically imbricated practice of identity production. She is intrigued by the intersection between practice and theory, and her most recent work attempts to perform film studies intermedially. With Alexandra Juhasz, Alisa started the online, community-based manifesto Beyond Story, published in World Records, that gave origin to Sheffield DocFest’s series of panel discussions and study groups (2019 and 2021).

Theo Anthony Theo Anthony is a filmmaker based in upstate New York. His first feature documentary, Rat Film, premiered at Festival del film Locarno and had a broadcast premiere on PBS’ Independent Lens in 2018. His follow-up, Subject to Review, produced for ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, played at the 2019 New York Film Festival and was broadcast nationally later that year. His most recent feature, All Light, Everywhere, premiered in competition at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury award.

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Juries & Awards

First Feature Award This award discovers and honours the future of non-fiction film, celebrating new talent and fresh perspectives.

Nominated Films Charm Circle Nira Burstein / USA / 2021 / 79’ / World Premiere / English

Rancho Pedro Speroni / Argentina / 2021 / 72’ / International Premiere / Spanish

Factory to the Workers / Tvornice Radnicima Srđan Kovačević / Croatia / 2021 / 105’ / World Premiere / Croatian

Songs For The River Charlotte Ginsborg / UK / 2021 / 77’ / World Premiere / English

Fixed Barricade at Hamdalaye Crossing / Barrage d’arrêt fixe et fermé au niveau du carrefour Hamdalaye Thomas Bauer / France, Guinea / 2020 / 70’ / International Premiere / French, Fulfulde

Summer / ЛЕТО Vadim Kostrov / Russia / 2020 / 109’ / World Premiere / Russian

From the Wild Sea Robin Petré / Denmark / 2021 / 78’ / UK Premiere / English

The Quintessence Pamela Breda / France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA / 2021 / 108’ / World Premiere / English, French

If god were a woman / Si dios fuera mujer Angélica Cervera / Colombia / 2021 / 71’ / World Premiere / Spanish Portrait Of Kaye Ben Reed / UK / 2021 / 59’ / World Premiere / English 26

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Short Film Award Supported by The Guardian.

This award presents the best of short films in the Festival, made by emerging and established filmmakers from around the world.

This award is qualifying for the Academy Awards.

Nominated Films Ancient Sunshine Jason Livingston / USA / 2021 / 19’ / World Premiere / English Aphorisms of the Lake / Aforismos del Lago Humberto González Bustillo / Venezuela / 2021 / 26’ / World Premiere / English, French, German, Spanish Barataria Julie Nguyen Van Qui / France, Spain / 2021 / 49’ / World Premiere / Spanish Blue Sky / Zerua blu Lur Olaizola Lizarralde / Spain / 2020 / 14’ / International Premiere / Basque, English, French Golden Flask / Auksinis Flakonas Jurgis Matulevicius, Paulius Anicas / Lithuania / 2020 / 28’ / International Premiere / Lithuanian, Russian Homage to the work of Philip Henry Gosse / Homenaje a la obra de Philip Henry Gosse Pablo Martin Weber / Argentina / 2020 / 22’ / European Premiere / Spanish 27

Madness Remixed Rhea Storr / UK / 2021 / 11’ / World Premiere / English Shelly Belly inna Real Life Cecilia Bengolea / Argentina, France / 2021 / 24’ / UK Premiere / English The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory Sema Basharan / UK / 2021 / 6’ / World Premiere / English The World of Mindfulness / Zing Nim Sai Gaai Ying Liang / Hong Kong / 2021 / 15’ / World Premiere / Cantonese, English, Mandarin The Year of The White Moon / God Beloi Luni Maxim Pechersky / Russia / 2020 / 21’ / International Premiere / Russian Tomorrow We’ll See / Domani si vedrà Lorenzo Vitrone / Italy / 2020 / 21’ / UK Premiere / Italian

Juries & Awards

Youth Jury Award This award is selected by some of the UK’s most passionate and stand-out young documentary lovers.

Gethin Morgan Gethin is a journalist currently working for The Culture Trip but looking to specialise in film. Born and raised in Ceredigion, rural West Wales, he studied journalism at The University of Sheffield, falling in love with the city and its premier film festival – so much so that he has stayed in Sheffield since graduating in 2019. Gethin is a huge fan of documentary cinema and has attended the festival every year since arriving in the city. He is particularly fond of cinema vérité, and looks for complexity, originality and humanity in documentary. His favourite films from Sheffield Doc Fest in recent years include When Lambs Become Lions, Midnight Family and Le Kiosque. “I’m so delighted to be a member of this year’s Youth Jury. Having attended the festival while studying at the University of Sheffield, I’m already well aware of how vibrant, exciting and inspiring an event it is. I cannot wait to return to that space in a bigger capacity, exposing my eyes and ears to some truly special pieces of filmmaking, as well as having the opportunity to meet so many amazing people in the industry.”

Follow Gethin: @GethinRMorgan

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Katherine Padmore Kat is a Sheffield-born, Leeds-based film student and freelance editor. She’s a BFI Academy alumni, an RTS bursary recipient, and a lover of Nūberu Bāgu films.

“I desperately wanted this golden opportunity to be able to engage with fellow young creatives and show the supporters of DocFest what kind of stories our generation is interested in. I couldn’t think of a better job than to watch and discuss films with my peers and being part of the Youth Jury gives me the rare opportunity to do exactly that. I can’t wait to see the sparkling new voices we’ll discover in our journey into the best and brightest of documentary filmmaking today.”

Follow Kat: @KatPadmore

Martha Robinson Martha is a third year Geography student at the University of Leeds, and is passionate about raising awareness of social injustice through the medium of film. “I am extremely excited by the opportunity to be on the Youth Jury at such a diverse, innovative and thought-provoking film festival. I am looking forward to critically discussing a range of unique and challenging documentaries with a team of passionate, like-minded young people while immersing myself in the vibrant festival atmosphere.”

Follow Martha: @martharobinsonn

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Juries & Awards

Nafsika Hadjichristou Nafsika is a documentary filmmaker and photographer from Cyprus, recent graduate from Film & TV Production at the University of York. “I’ve been in love with Sheffield DocFest since attending for the first time in 2018, and being part of the Youth Jury is a dream role. We get such an insight into the intriguing and complex worlds of films, festivals, art, and the whole planet, while working with wonderful individuals. I can’t wait to get started!”

Follow Nafsika: https://nafsikah.wordpress.com/

Natalie Peteranna Natalie is a Scottish Film and Media Graduate, who grafts as a Marketing Assistant for Yellow Cherry Digital. “I feel really honoured to represent Sheffield DocFest as a Youth Juror. As our industry recovers from the global and unanticipated challenges of last year, I’m sure that this retention will be as robust, inspiring, and inclusive as ever. It is thrilling to connect with fellow Jurors. What a unique opportunity to explore and evaluate sensational documentaries as a team!”

Follow Natalie: @natpeteranna

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Reba Martin Reba is 23 years old from Bristol, currently living in Edinburgh by way of Manchester. She has been writing about programming and marketing, and helping to make films since she got the bug as an impressionable teen. “I am so excited to discuss and obsess over films with my fellow Youth Jury members, learning to be part of a critical team. I am looking forward to spending so much time looking at documentaries, exploring DocFest, and discovering what goes into putting on such a wicked festival.”

Follow Reba: @discorebekah

Nominated Films

Delphine’s Prayers / Les prières de Delphine Rosine Mbakam / Belgium, Cameroon / 2021 / 90’ / UK Premiere / French Gallant Indies / Indes galantes Philippe Béziat / France / 2020 / 108’ / UK Premiere / English, French If god were a woman / Si dios fuera mujer Angélica Cervera / Colombia / 2021 / 71’ / World Premiere / Spanish Splinters / Esquirlas Natalia Garayalde / Argentina / 2020 / 70’ / UK Premiere / Spanish The Inheritance Ephraim Asili / USA / 2020 / 100’ / UK Premiere / English The Silence of The Mole / El silencio del Topo Anais Taracena / Guatemala / 2021 / 93’ / European Premiere / Spanish 31

Juries & Awards

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Juries & Awards

Opening Film

Summer of Soul (...Or When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson / Joseph Patel, Robert Fyvolent, David Dinerstein / USA / 2021 / 117’ / European Premiere / English Summer of Soul (...Or When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) is the acclaimed debut by filmmaker Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson. For six weeks in the summer of 1969, just 100 miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). It was an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture and fashion.

After that summer, the footage was never seen and 34

largely forgotten – until now. Summer of Soul brings us back to a powerful and transformative moment in history and stands as a testament to music and culture as collective empowerment. In times of unrest, it comes as a moving testimony and an inspiration. Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson presents a powerful and transporting film that includes never-before-seen concert performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Ray Baretto, Abbey Lincoln & Max Roach and more.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Closing Film

The Story of Looking Mark Cousins / Mary Bell, Adam Dawtrey / UK / 2021 / 90’ / World Premiere / English The Story of Looking sees Mark Cousins prepare for surgery to restore his vision. Cousins explores the role that visual experience plays in our individual and collective lives. In a deeply personal meditation on the power of looking in his own life, he guides us through the riches of the visible world, a kaleidoscope of extraordinary imagery across cultures and eras. At a time when we are more assailed by images than ever, he reveals how looking makes us who we are, lying at the heart of human experience, empathy, discovery and

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thought. He shares the pleasure and pain of seeing the world, in all its complexity and contradiction, with eyes wide open. As the COVID-19 pandemic brings another dramatic shift of perspective, he reaches out to other lookers for their vision from lockdown, and travels to the future to consider how his looking life will continue to develop until the very end.

Sales: Modern Films Nominated for: MeetMarket Pitched

Opening / Closing Film

International Competition One of cinema’s capabilities is to offer multi-layered reflections of the world, through which the unique qualities of the specific time and space that the maker is living through can be expressed. History, stories, and territories – whether distant or close, real or imaginary – can become solidified within the singular, shared universe of the screen. This International Competition selection consists of films that remind us of these cinematic possibilities, from microcosms (like a family unit, a prison cell, or intimate dreams and recollections) to macrocosms (such as social shifts, the history of colonisation and ethnocide, or the complex paradoxes of capitalism). It is a selection where individual and collective perspectives intertwine, interrogating each other through methods that are either delicate, or bold and affirmingly confrontational. Representing 14 countries and 13 spoken languages, with a number of films coming from emerging talent making work across different continents, this selection offers a variety of unique and transformative visions. Over the selection of 11 films, we present a map of complex worlds. In Vladimir Léon’s My Dear Spies, Vladimir and his brother Pierre investigate the story of their own family by excavating the invisible layers of a wider Russian history in Paris. Nira Burstein’s Charm Circle, meanwhile, is an adventurous family journey where the filmmaking process becomes embroiled in the shifting relationship between the members of the family.

Silas Tiny’s Equatorial Constellations is both a patient homage to the ordinary people who endured the Biafran War and a critique on the colonialist world vision that brought about the European occupation in Africa that has been perpetuated through later forms of colonialism.

In a different part of the world, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, and Roberto Romero’s This is Our Land! is part performance and part land reclamation. It is a brave film where a group of dispossessed Indigenous farmers confront the white people who have stolen their land. Set in Pakistan, Anam Abbas’ This Stained Dawn is both a portrait and a shield for women fighting for justice and equality in resistance to the hegemonic powers in the country.

Srdan Kovacevic’s Factory to the Workers and Pedro Speroni’s Rancho are two deep, almost obsessive works of comradery. The first, which is set in Croatia, was made with the workers of the last collectively owned factory, which hails from the former Yugoslavia; it is a film that confronts the reality of our contemporary capitalist societies. The second is set in Argentina.

Shooting entirely in a prison, Speroni uses cinema as a tool to reflect on the meanings of space, exploring bodily and social bonds forged in the face of confinement and oppression.

Phillip Hartmann’s From the 84 Days is a film that is haunted by COVID-19, but which trusts the power of collective creative processes as an aid for coping with the harshness of reality. Musical improvisation by a group of Bolivian Indigenous experimental musicians locked in Germany shifts into a meditation on displacement. Viera Čákanyová’s White on White is also built for a meditative state. Shot at the Polish Antarctic Station, it is a personal reflection on intimacy and isolation, and the codes that are inherent to various forms of communication. This is a film that explores what subjectivity can mean.

Komori Haruka and Seo Natsumi’s Double Layered Town is intended as a gentle space for listening; it is a film where memory is both a medium and a question. In Vadim Kostrov’s Summer, youngsters in a remote Siberian industrial town exist among a landscape of blooming nature and unseen histories.

The patterns of their bodies and words form gestures, creating something with a lively form that mimics the choreography of a poem.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

— Cíntia Gil

Aus den 84 Tagen / From The 84 Days

Director(s): Philipp Hartmann Producer(s): Philipp Hartmann flumenfilm, OEIN, PHØNIX16 Bolivia, Germany / 2021 / 105’ / World Premiere / German, Spanish

In March 2020, 25 young musicians from the Bolivian Experimental Orchestra for Indigenous Instruments (OEIN) came to Germany to play concerts in Berlin and Dresden. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the concerts were cancelled. Then, as Bolivia closed its borders, the musicians found themselves stuck in the Music Academy in Rheinsberg/Brandenburg for almost three months. Together with their German colleagues in the ensembles PHØNIX16 and noiserkroiser, they face the crisis by developing several musical projects, a large part of which involves incorporating improvisation into contemporary music. By leaving the stage mainly to the musicians and their performance, the camera becomes part of the improvisation, also

opening up the question of how music can be filmed.

This is a film about music as a form of communication in a state of exception.

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International Competition

Sales: Phillip Hartmann

Bílá na Bílé / White on White

Director(s): Viera Čákanyová Producer(s): Nina Numankadić, Viera Čákanyová Czech Republic, Slovakia / 2020 / 74’ / International Premiere / English, Slovak

White on White is the video diary that filmmaker Viera Čákanyová kept while staying at the Polish Antarctic station, where she shot her neural network-led film FREM (2019) in 2017. During her stay, the author talks with a compellingly conversant AI chat bot, driving conversations that touch on the nature of film, art, and the meaning of life, while also revealing a way of thinking which – free from a distinctly human emotionality – forces deep introspection. Footage from her ordinary, everyday life at the station contrasts with lyrical images of the Antarctic’s immaculate scenery and wildlife. Čákanyová complements this with her own probing and intelligent commentary, provoked by the loneliness of the ice-covered landscape.

Sales: Nina Numankadić

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Charm Circle

Director(s): Nira Burstein Producer(s): Betsy Laikin USA / 2021 / 79’ / World Premiere / English

Charm Circle is a cinéma vérité portrait of an eccentric New York family navigating the chaos that divides them. After uncovering a treasure trove of home videos documenting the moments of love, laughter, and musical expression that punctuated an otherwise tumultuous upbringing, filmmaker Nira Burstein returns to her childhood home – now crumbling from the inside out – to explore whether she and her two sisters can reconnect with her parents. Catalyzed by the announcement of her younger sister’s polyamorous wedding, refueling tensions threaten to sever what’s left of the family bond. Burstein’s brave, wryly amusing first feature is a tender, unpredictable study of a family struggling against an array of issues with

honesty and a steely sense of humour. Going beneath the surface of the social struggles of its subjects, the film reveals people as more than the problems they experience and the labels applied to them.

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International Competition

Sales: Betsy Laikin Nominated for: the First Feature Award

Equatorial Constellations

Director(s): Silas Tiny Producer(s): Rui Alexandre Santos Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe / 2021 / 106’ / World Premiere / Igbo, Portuguese

On May 30th 1967, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu unilaterally declared the independence of the state of Biafra from Nigeria. The Nigerian federal government, ruled at the time by Yakubu Gowon, led a military offensive over Biafra to attempt to recover the region.

Hostilities opened the way for large-scale war, the first post-colonial conflict on African soil. São Tomé, then a Portuguese colony, is close to Biafra by air. Its geographic position allowed the establishment of humanitarian airlift efforts which saved hundreds of thousands of children from starvation, an event widely considered to be the first civilian aid operation in the 20th century. Through archive, landscape, and the contemporary testimonies of the child refugees

and humanitarian workers involved, Equatorial Constellations traces the physical and immaterial debris that remains in São Tomé.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: DIVINA COMÉDIA

Mes chers espions / My Dear Spies

Director(s): Vladimir Léon Producer(s): Jean-Marie Gigon France / 2020 / 134’ / UK Premiere / French, Russian

In contemporary Paris, filmmaker Vladimir Léon delivers his brother Pierre an old suitcase that he had taken from their mother’s house after she died. In it, they find documents connecting their Russian grandparents, Lily and Constantin, with the Soviet secret services working in Paris before the Second World War. The two brothers then begin an investigation, travelling from Paris to Russia, and wandering among the ruins of lost worlds and unspoken stories. They talk, sing, and drink, meeting friends, witnesses, and historians, and uncovering counterespionage reports, testimonies from daily life under the Soviet Empire, and memories of the gulags. In the process, the fears of the remote past reappear like ghosts and seem closer than may be expected.

Sales: SaNoSi Productions

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International Competition

Niju no machi / Kotaichi no uta o amu / Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions Director(s): Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi Producer(s): Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi Japan / 2020 / 78’ / International Premiere / Japanese

Set in Rikuzentakata, Iwate, Japan, in the year 2031, Double Layered Town is a story written by Seo Natsumi, which plants the seeds for new folktales to be born in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. It details the town that once stood there, and also a speculative one built on elevated land. In Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions, four travellers who do not know each other head to Rikuzentakata in 2018, listening to what the local people have to say, staging dialogues together, and reciting stories. Through these cycles of listening, reporting, and retelling, these travellers find their own speaking voice. Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions is a record of a place

where a small ‘succession’ was initiated, captured in this filmic portrait with a delicate touch.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Emi Ueyama

Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra é Nossa! / Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land is our Land!

Director(s): Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero Producer(s): Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero Brazil / 2020 / 70’ / International Premiere / Maxakali , Portuguese

Filmed on their own land, This Land is our Land! is a unique and multilayered visual cartography made by Brazilian Indigenous filmmakers Isael and Sueli Maxakali and their collaborators. Following Yãmīhex: The Women-Spirit (2019), a landmark in Brazilian Indigenous cinema, Isael and Sueli Maxakali have crafted another personal film that shifts across multiple forms, combining mourning practices, rituals, and chanting, with interviews and observational material to create a study of white violence that reminds us of the urgency of seeing beyond the western gaze. Sharing their complex understanding of physical, historical, and mythological space through the film’s form, the filmmakers chart a hypnotic journey that acts as a

manifesto against all kinds of borders, those that divide nations and those that demarcate land. Farmers in the area may have violently taken their land, but this has not silenced them, as is shown by this film with its tender yet boldly confrontational gaze.

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International Competition

Sales: Roberto Romero Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

Rancho

Director(s): Pedro Speroni Producer(s): Ignacio Sarchi, Pedro Speroni, Mercedes Speroni Argentina / 2021 / 72’ / International Premiere / Spanish

In a maximum-security prison in Argentina, a boxer doggedly seeks his freedom. A group of guys dream of one day making their millions. A young man comes in for killing his stepfather. The leader of the place has been sitting in there for 30 years. Throughout, the same word is repeated: ‘rancho’, used with a liberating flexibility. You call your friend ‘rancho’, you ‘ranch’ together. Pedro Speroni’s prison portrait is a highly concentrated one, built entirely from the moments these men share while incarcerated. Their exchanges are intense: they joke about muggings, about beating people to a pulp; they jostle and spar; they confide in quiet moments. Society puts up barriers that these men bounce against like balls in a

pinball machine, all ending, ultimately, in the same place. What they create there together is its own kind of utopia: a closed environment with rules and norms of its own making.

Sales: Pedro Speroni Nominated for: the First Feature Award

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

ЛЕТО / Summer

Director(s): Vadim Kostrov Producer(s): Gleb Piryatinskiy Russia / 2020 / 109’ / World Premiere / Russian

Set in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, Summer journeys nostalgically through the warm middle-Ural summer with eight-year-old Vadim and his half-sister Christina.

They enjoy evening festivities with their older teenage friends by the fire, go on mellow skateboard rides, and have a quiet daytime nap in the garden house.

Caressed by the sun and the warmth of his relatives, hidden in the quiet tranquillity of the garden and far away from the cruelty of the outside world, Vadim enjoys his childhood days. Acting as a serene lullaby that mimics the movements of a gentle breeze, Summer provides warmth, joy and solace, offering hope and strength for the future.

Sales: Gleb Piryatinskiy Nominated for: the First Feature Award

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International Competition

This Stained Dawn

Director(s): Anam Abbas Producer(s): Anam Abbas Pakistan / 2021 / 89’ / World Premiere / English, Urdu

Detailing the preparation of the multi-city Aurat March (Women’s March) in Pakistan, This Stained Dawn tells the story of a feminist movement asserting itself in the country’s urban spaces through the eyes of the march’s organisers. Just a few weeks before the start of the pandemic, 10,000 protesters gathered in Karachi. Filmmaker Anam Abbas follows the organisers of the march as they negotiate a deeply surveilled, paranoia-inducing, and often physically violent space in the hopes of spurring a revolution. The film’s approach is, suitably, a polyphonic one. Observational footage of the event’s planning and orchestration mixes with animation, surveillance footage, and archive, tracing a history of the state suppression of women’s resist-

ance in Pakistan and illuminating the urgency of the unfolding struggle of today. What emerges is a philosophical work, not just about the Aurat March, but about the act of political organising itself.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Anam Abbas

Tvornice Radnicima / Factory to the Workers

Director(s): Srđan Kovačević Producer(s): Sabina Krešić Croatia / 2021 / 105’ / World Premiere / Croatian

In Croatia in 2005, a machine tools factory was occupied by its workers. Since then, they have operated collectively, becoming the only successful example of a worker occupation in post-socialist Europe. Today, as they seek a new model of collective ownership, the microcosmic world of the factory clashes with the forces of the globalised market economy, having an increasingly brutal impact on wages and the organisation of the factory, causing rising disaffection among the workers. Filmmaker Srđan Kovačević returns regularly over a five year period to make a film that charts the evolution of this communal enterprise. Factory to the Workers tells the inside story of the workers who challenged the dominant economic

narrative with their actions. After a decade, the same question remains: can a factory in the hands of workers survive at the periphery of capitalism, or do we need a bigger dream?

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International Competition

Sales: Sabina Krešić Nominated for: the First Feature Award

UK Competition This year Sheffield DocFest announced a UK Competition as part of an ongoing commitment to nurture and launch home-grown films. This is a selection of independent films of all lengths, all of which are UK productions or co-productions. Each film brings a unique perspective, and each filmmaker contributes in rich ways to the future UK and international film landscape.

Some are shot here in the UK, such as Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8, an exploration of – and love letter to – the diverse and often misunderstood area of Toxteth; up in Cromarty Firth in Cold Stack, which charts the melancholic decline of the oil rig industry in the Scottish Highlands; and down to South London where graffiti that reads RIP SENI calls attention to Seni Lewis, a young Black man who died at the hands of police officers. Also in London, the residents of a housing co-operative speak of their experiences throughout the recent national lockdowns in Songs for the River, and The Battle of Denham Ford takes us to the front line of a HS2 protest where a group of environmental campaigners pit themselves against the full force of the law in an effort to save a single tree. Shot on a moonlit night on the bank of the River Severn, The Elvermen reveals the last of a hidden community hunting an endangered fish.

In more intimate settings, we meet an agoraphobic 74-year-old as she discovers the opportunity to explore personal and sexual freedoms in Portrait of Kaye, and, in Alive, we encounter opera singer Marilyn Minns through a study of her life from childhood through to her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Then, through In The Space You Left, from the confines of her home in England, a filmmaker embarks on a digital quest to track down an old friend who disappeared years ago in Japan.

From Japan, we take a 400km pilgrimage through Iraq with a 9-year-old boy with mutism, who travels with his favourite animal in Ali and His Miracle Sheep, and journey to the Ecuadorian Amazon, where a family travels deep into the jungle to escape the COVID-19 pandemic in The Return. Another film shot abroad, and in this case as part of a collaborative project, CAUGHT mixes fiction and observational documentary methods to express the struggles for recognition and justice of trans Latina women working in

New York City’s sex industry. Also experimenting with form is Madness Remixed, which explores the image of exoticism portrayed by Josephine Baker, questioning the terms by which images of Black bodies performing should be reproduced. Finally, we head to outer space in The Quintessence, which analyses the hidden dreams and expectations of those shaping contemporary research about the universe.

The titles in our first UK Competition selection offer great diversity in subject and style, and in length and form. While each film is crafted in very different ways, there is a true distinctiveness of voice behind all of them. There are numerous young and brave filmmakers in this diverse territory: people who have the fortitude and imagination to invent their own rules and build their own visions. In a country with such a strong and powerful media culture, it is sometimes difficult to be heard and acknowledged as unique, especially in the context of independent film.

At Sheffield DocFest, we want to stand by these brave filmmakers and artists, and make a contribution to a stronger, more plural, and more diverse independent film sector.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

— Melanie Iredale and Cíntia Gil

Ali and His Miracle Sheep

Director(s): Maythem Ridha Producer(s): Maythem Ridha Iraq, UK / 2021 / 25’ / World Premiere / Arabic

Guided by his grandmother’s haunting Sumerian lament, 9-year-old mute Ali takes his sheep, Kirmenta, for sacrifice on a strenuous 400km journey across Iraq’s war-ruined landscapes to the shrine of an ancient saint. Kirmeta becomes increasingly resistant, running away from his bloody fate. Ali eventually finds Kirmeta amongst carcasses of cars leftover from decades of violence and false promises of freedom. When Kirmeta collapses from exhaustion, the pilgrims think he is dead, but with the help of Ali’s grandmother’s prayers, the sheep mysteriously recovers. Witnessing this, the pilgrims declare him a “Miracle Sheep”, a reputation that accompanies them for the rest of their journey. Can both boy and sheep survive the

hardship and accept their fate? Ali and His Miracle Sheep is a lyrical film with a hybrid form in which symbolism exposes the suffering of a nation whose only hope left is a mute child and his “miraculous” sheep.

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UK Competition

Sales: 7th Heaven Studios

Alive

Director(s): Makeda Matheson Producer(s): Makeda Matheson UK / 2021 / 11’ / World Premiere / English

A moving and joyful time capsule, Alive introduces opera singer Marilyn Minns, showing some facets of her present condition before delving into her past. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, her memories are increasingly fragmented. Archive photography of Minn’s childhood is narrated using a 2014 interview, in which she talks about her childhood singing, and about her brief stint in the band Jokers Wild (whose lead singer, Dave Gilmore, would go on to form Pink Floyd). Weaving between the past and present, Alive introduces the man who will become her husband, a disgruntled lover, notable performances she took part in, and documentation of the mobility that her musicality awarded her. Following the shared reading of a letter – in which she outlines

an episode in her life that she refers to as “the Russian saga” – Marilyn surmises the roles family, friends, passion, and love have played in her life, landing the film with a trailing air of hope.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Makeda Matheson

CAER / CAUGHT

Director(s): Nicola Mai Producer(s): Nicola Mai, J. Leigh Oshiro-Brantly UK / 2021 / 61’ / European Premiere / English, Spanish

The result of the collaboration between Nicola Mai and the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective – a grassroots association defending the rights of trans Latina migrant women in Queens, New York City – CAUGHT acts as a tribute to the work and legacy of Lorena Borjas, the mother of Latin trans women living in Queens, who was one of the first victims of COVID-19 in New York in March 2020. CAUGHT mixes collaborative ethno-fiction methods with an observational documentary mode to involve its participants throughout its production. Written and performed by members of the TRANSgrediendo Intercultural Collective, the film follows Rosa and Paloma as they face transphobic violence, persecution from the po-

lice, and fight against a hostile political environment in the US, while also expressing their identities in positive ways during a drag show that allows them to counter their marginalisation and stigmatisation.

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UK Competition

Sales: Nicola Mai

Cold Stack

Director(s): Frank Martin Producer(s): Frank Martin UK / 2021 / 12’ / World Premiere / English

Divided into three parts, Cold Stack charts the melancholic decline of the oil rig industry in the Scottish Highlands. The film uncovers the destructive effects of the collapse on those who were employed by the industry, and showcases the grand visual spectacle of the dereliction of the rigs in the Cromarty Firth. The first part documents the Kishorn fabrication yard on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, encountering those who worked there during the great boom of the 1970s and 80s, and showing the ghostly remains of the yard in its current all but abandoned state. The second part shows the Cromarty Firth, where dozens of unused oil rigs are ‘cold stacked’, covering the effects of economic decline on those

who formerly worked constructing the platforms.

The final section looks to the future, considering the otherworldly beauty of the new form of energy that is dominant in the highlands: wind farming.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Frank Martin

Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8

Director(s): Daniel Draper, Allan Melia Producer(s): Christie Allanson UK / 2021 / 89’ / World Premiere / English

In the early 1970s, photojournalist Don McCullin photographed the area of Toxteth in Liverpool, capturing the place during an era of transition and decline. Focusing on one photograph from his collection, Almost Liverpool 8 paints a parallel contemporary portrait of the same area through the eyes of the people who inhabit it today. From Turner Prize winning projects to a new generation of poets and artists, this film heads into the heart of the community to meet photographers, beekeepers, and the people that make ‘L8’ a model example of a modern community. A melting pot of cultures where Georgian townhouses rub shoulders with social housing, and Mosques stand opposite Synagogues, people from all countries converge in an area

that is as diverse as its population. Almost Liverpool 8 is a lyrical look at an often misunderstood community.

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UK Competition

Sales: Shut Out The Light

In The Space You Left

Director(s): Christine Saab Producer(s): Ju Park, Christine Saab UK / 2021 / 23’ / World Premiere / English

From the confines of her home in England, a filmmaker embarks on a digital quest to track down an old friend who disappeared years ago in Japan. With the internet as her only resource, she stumbles upon ‘The Inquirers’, a website full of souls looking for lost people. As she gets closer to finding her friend, she finds herself wondering why it is so hard to forget about some people, and, equally, why is it often necessary to let them go. In The Space You Left is a film about the meaning of missed connections in the digital age.

Sales: National Film and Television School

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Madness Remixed

Director(s): Rhea Storr Producer(s): Rhea Storr UK / 2021 / 11’ / World Premiere / English

Madness Remixed explores the image of exoticism portrayed by Josephine Baker in a 1926 performance entitled The Madness of the Day in which Baker wore the infamous skirt, made of only bananas, that played into stereotypes of Black women as hyper-sexualised.

Madness Remixed questions the conditions under which the skirt should be revived, considering that Beyonce, Miley Cyrus, and Diana Ross have all worn the same skirt more recently. 16mm film coated with latex and glitter – a fetishised medium in itself – is data-moshed with Baker in Siren of the Tropics (1927).

Sales: Rhea Storr Nominated for: the Short Film Award 55

UK Competition

Portrait Of Kaye

Director(s): Ben Reed Producer(s): Ben Reed UK / 2021 / 59’ / World Premiere / English

Restricted by her lifelong agoraphobia, Kaye has spent most of her life within the four walls of her parents’ house. Finding relief from her fears in the faces and lives of old film stars, she pastes their images alongside those of her deceased family on the walls of her house, creating a kaleidoscopic collage that mixes personal history with Hollywood fantasy. Told first-hand via freewheeling monologues, Portrait of Kaye is a bittersweet portrait of a woman forming her own unique identity while navigating the conflicting influences of her mother’s bawdy humour and her father’s anxieties.

Now 74 and recently widowed, her infatuation with a younger neighbour gives her an opportunity to explore personal and sexual freedoms that have always

been hidden away. Shot over two years, former nextdoor neighbour and music video director Ben Reed has assembled a unique and touching meditation on family, film and the meaning of freedom.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Agile Films Nominated for: the First Feature Award

RIP SENI

Director(s): Daisy Ifama Producer(s): Grace Shutti, Lucy Owen UK / 2021 / 20’ / World Premiere / English

Overnight on 24th June 2020, graffiti reading ‘RIP SENI’ appeared on a public artwork outside Bethlem Royal Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in South London. The red spray-painted letters called attention to Seni Lewis, a 23-year-old black man who died at the hands of 11 police officers while in the care of the hospital in 2010. The artwork had been created by Turner-prize nominee Mark Titchner. It was made up of eight placards asking questions about mental capacity and assessment, creating a powerful resonance between the artwork and the new graffiti. This film reflects multiple perspectives, from mental health professionals to families who have lost loved ones in police custody, prisons and psychiatric hospitals. It

explores Seni’s story, the crisis of mental health and racism in the UK, the long fight for justice and what happens when members of the public take art into their own hands.

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UK Competition

Sales: Daisy Ifama

Songs For The River

Director(s): Charlotte Ginsborg Producer(s): Astrid Edwards, Charlotte Ginsborg UK / 2021 / 71’ / World Premiere / English

Over the course of a year, filmmaker Charlotte Ginsborg filmed the London housing co-operative that she lives in, looking to chart the residents’ diverse experiences of the pandemic, across the daily life of numerous national lockdowns. Some experienced the illness itself, while others faced the stress of work on the front line.

Each Saturday, the residents came together to sing with each other from their communal balconies and walkways, and these songs permeate throughout the film. Increasingly frustrated by the government, residents experienced an emotional rollercoaster that is reflected in a film wherein the personal and political interweave, to create an intimate and moving portrait of a unique community during an extraordinary time.

Sales: Damselfish Productions Limited Nominated for: First Feature Award

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

The Battle of Denham Ford

Director(s): Bradley & Bradley Producer(s): Bradley & Bradley UK / 2021 / 27’ / World Premiere / English

Currently a primary focus for environmental campaigners in the UK, HS2 is a controversial new highspeed rail line being built from London to the North of England. Documenting a single day on the front line of battles against the HS2 construction, The Battle of Denham Ford tells the story of attempts by HS2 contractors to fell a tree that overhung their compound.

A protest camp sits adjacent to the compound, and, hearing of the plan, the activists installed a climber in the tree. As the day unfolds, the film documents as a range of private security contractors, with support from the police and emergency services, try to regain possession of the tree. Raising questions about the relationship between private citizens, corpora-

tions, and the state, the film places the viewer on the ground, offering a perspective that is as close to the experience of being there as any film could deliver.

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UK Competition

Sales: Fifth Column Films

The Elvermen

Director(s): Isla Badenoch Producer(s): Joe Binks UK / 2021 / 14’ / World Premiere / English

Shot over a moonlit night, The Elvermen is an atmospheric film that reveals the last of a hidden community hunting an endangered fish. As the sun sets on the banks of the River Severn, on the outskirts of an impoverished city in the UK, a group of men race to catch a vanishing creature, the elusive elver (baby eel), supposedly worth more than its weight in gold. Over the course of a single night, the film surveys the mysterious world of the Elvermen: fathers, sons, brothers and friends addicted to the gamble of the stake-out, and the promise that it offers. Phone calls of frustration and joy echo down a river lit by head torches. The Elvermen shows how a rite of passage has changed into a fight for values: for tradition, for community,

and for a connection to nature in an environment of impending change.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Glass Onion Films Ltd

The Return

Director(s): Eriberto Gualinga Producer(s): Nina Gualinga, Marc Silver Ecuador, UK / 2021 / 17’ / World Premiere / Kichwa

It’s spring in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Uyantza festival is underway with the community celebrating all that the forest has to offer. Meanwhile, news is breaking around the world that a novel virus is spreading and a state of emergency is declared across the country. As people test positive for COVID-19 in the community, some families decide to leave and head deeper into the jungle. Disconnected from school, friends, the internet, and work, one family learns to reconnect with life in the forest. The children begin to unlearn the national curriculum, and instead are taught Indigenous knowledge that mainstream schools normally pass over. As COVID-19 wreaks havoc around the planet, the family reconnect to their ancestral

ways, but as news arrives that Ecuador’s lockdown will end soon, will the family choose to return?

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UK Competition

Sales: The Guardian

The Quintessence

Director(s): Pamela Breda Producer(s): Pamela Bradley France, Italy, Switzerland, UK, USA / 2021 / 68’ / World Premiere / English, French

Constructed during a three-year-long research period that involved visits to more than 20 centres and laboratories dedicated to the advanced research of outer space, The Quintessence considers the scientific study of outer space as a narrative, and analyses the hidden dreams and expectations of those shaping contemporary research about the universe.

Audio interviews with scientists provide an intimate insight into astrophysicists’ ideas and creative intuitions, moving beyond the traditional academic representation of scientists as individuals possessing an unquestionable knowledge of the universe, while the visuals generate a sensorial representation of highly-secluded scientific laboratories, often situated in

remote locations and usually not accessible to the general public. Looking into the nature of scientific progress, and our role as investigators of the universe, this film provides a unique angle on the act of looking at the stars.

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sales: Pamela Breda Nominated for: the First Feature Award

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UK Competition

Special Screenings We are pleased to present five films that resonate, in different ways, with the highlighted themes across our film programme, made by filmmakers who are well known to our audiences and whose work we want to follow.

Steve McQueen has played a critical role in calling out the lack of visibility of Black people and voices in mainstream narratives, denouncing structural racism as a condition prevalent within our screen cultures. Utilising public television as a way of widening access to his work, so as to continue the discussions he has been facilitating through it to date, Uprising is an uncompromising example of McQueen’s commitment to engaging directly with the communities who have seen their stories systematically silenced and hidden. The series displays an understanding of the way various forms of fascism and white supremacy can be found at the core of our societies today, all across the western world.

Clive Patterson brings Sing, Freetown, featuring two enormous figures from the culture of Sierra Leone: Sorious Samura and Charlie Haffner. Samura has spent his life reporting on the suffering and injustices endured by African peoples and by communities in Sierra Leone, and Charlie Haffner, one of the greatest theatre directors in the country, has created ‘Freetong Players International’, a theatre group dedicated to expanding the role of theatre in the country so that it can also serve as an educational tool and a way of building community. Restoring traditional songs and rituals to a common consciousness, Haffner’s project involves retelling stories in order to uncover the richness of Sierra Leone’s history. Together, they work to create a play that offers a positive image of the country, moving away from the stereotypes that have been burying the rich culture of the country.

With A Pandemic Poem: WHERE DID THE WORLD GO?, Brian Hill presents another compelling collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage.

Hill’s imaginative way of intertwining television and cinema through a poetic approach, wherein reality is the basis for a moving form of lyricism, makes the film an existential reflection on humanity and community, which takes place at the center of COVID-19 in the UK. Armitage’s voice and words – which look

for simplicity and clarity without refusing emotion – provide the film with a tone that provokes thought and rejects comfortable resignation.

2021 marks the passing of twenty years since the 9/11 attacks, and the world today is a greatly different one to what it was then. To signal this moment, we have programmed three films that offer different perspectives of the events that took place that day.

Phil Grabsky and Shoaib Sharifi’s My Childhood, My Country: 20 Years in Afghanistan is a sequel to The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2003) and The Boy Mir: Ten Years in Afghanistan (2011). In a touching work of sustained empathy, Mir – a boy whose life has been marked by the presence of the Taliban and the effects of 9/11 – grows up in a country that has faced devastation and is fighting to return to its feet. Co-directed with journalist Shoaib Sharifi, the film completes a trilogy that will stand as a unique testimony of the dramatic changes that occur incrementally over time.

Operating at the opposite end of the spectrum, Daniel Bogado’s 9/11: One Day in America is the first episode of a series that looks to describe the day’s events in New York hour by hour, through footage captured in situ which brings back the sense of astonishment, shock, and urgency that was felt across the globe at the time. A powerful work of editing and storytelling, there is a precision in the measurement of the gravity of each image. When describing an event that offers one of the biggest challenges to our understanding of realism, and of reality, Bogado intertwines contemporary testimony with fictional-style assemblage.

Finally, screening online, Arthur Cary’s Surviving 9/11 provides some perspectives from victims: from foreigners living in New York, to the relatives of those who piloted the planes, or the authorities who were involved in saving lives on the day. Looking back and acknowledging the two decades past, the film tries to string together three emotional threads: trauma, mourning, and the irrepressible desire for life.

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— Cíntia Gil

9/11: One Day in America Director(s): Daniel Bogado Producer(s): David Glover, Dan Lindsay, T.J. Martin UK / 2020 / 76’ / UK Premiere / English

Created by Daniel Bogado and 72 Films (Inside North Korea’s Dynasty), and executive produced by Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin (Undefeated, LA 92), Daniel Bogado’s 9/11: One Day in America was made to mark 20 years since the attacks of 9/11. Produced in official collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the series uses archival footage – some of which has never been seen before – and new, original interviews with eyewitnesses who have now had almost two decades to reflect on the events they lived through. Accumulatively, 9/11: One Day in America offers a powerful, immersive, and emotionally charged account of that fateful day.

A Pandemic Poem: WHERE DID THE WORLD GO? Director(s): Brian Hill Producer(s): Mark Cooper Jones - Century Films UK / 2021 / 70’ / World Premiere / English

When Brian Hill and Simon Armitage started hearing about the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020, it felt right to produce an artistic response to the crisis, to document and record what was happening in an extended film poem. In Where Did The World Go, a number of people from across the UK talk about their own experiences of living through a pandemic, while the poetry of Simon Armitage provides a narrative spine to the film. To bring this poetry to life on screen, director Brian Hill uses a variety of techniques: mixing archive footage, musical sequences, and contemporary dance. At times moving, at other times poignant, the film is a unique record of what will become the biggest event in the lives of many people living today.

Sales: Century Films Ltd. 65

Special Screenings

My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan Director(s): Phil Grabsky, Shoaib Sharifi Producer(s): Phil Grabsky, Amanda Wilkie, Jutta Krug UK, Afghanistan / 2021 / 90’ / World Premiere / Dari

Sales: Bomanbridge

In 2014, director Richard Linklater released Boyhood, a fictional coming-of-age saga that was filmed using the same cast across twelve years. This film mirrors that concept: creating a real-life epic of boyhood and manhood that follows the same individual over 20 years, living in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. When we first meet Mir, he is a mischievous boy of seven living in a cave in central Afghanistan alongside the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two statues that were recently destroyed. For two decades, the film follows the adventures of his life, until, as an adult with a family of his own, he decides to pursue his own career as a news cameraman in Kabul. More than just a personal journey, My Childhood, My Country is an powerful examination of what has – and has not – been achieved in Afghanistan over the past 20 years.

Sing, Freetown Director(s): Clive Patterson Producer(s): Clive Patterson UK, USA / 2021 / 94’ / World Premiere / English, Krio

Sales: Insight TWI Films

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Raised in Sierra Leone, and now a Londoner, Sorious Samura is one of his nation’s most celebrated TV journalists. However, two decades of telling negative stories about Africa has taken its toll. Desperate to change the narrative, he turns to his best friend and mentor, Charlie Haffner, a playwright from Sierra Leone.

Together, these two friends embark on a journey to create an inspiring work of national theatre, hoping to restore pride to a nation that despite having an amazing history, remains one of the world’s poorest countries.

Grappling with themes of national identity and the profound impact of British Colonial rule, the pair’s personal and creative differences threaten to derail their project and their lifelong friendship. Cultures collide and tensions flare as the nation itself teeters on the brink of civil unrest. For both men, the play becomes a matter of personal and national salvation. Exhausted, they push to opening night. The curtain lifts.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Surviving 9/11 (Working Title) Director(s): Arthur Cary Producer(s): Cheryl Hockey UK / 2021 / 89’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Keshet International

9/11 is perhaps the defining event of the contemporary era. Broadcast internationally, it is a moment in modern history that everyone over a certain age feels that they lived through. This film takes the form of two intertwining narratives: the two hour period when terrorists attacked the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Flight 93; and the story of the 20 years that have passed since.

Told by a mix of British and American contributors, this is a deeply personal film about survival and loss. Using a combination of testimony, and personal and public archive, the day unfolds almost as if in real time. Lyrical contemporary scenes explore how the lives of individuals continue to be affected by moments that took place in that two hour period, and through the indelible imprint on their lives, an impression is generated of the impact that that day had on the wider world.

Uprising Director(s): Steve McQueen, James Rogan Producer(s): Steve McQueen, Nancy Bornat, James Rogan, Soleta Rogan, Tracey Scoffield, Ann Smith Tenser, David Tanner, Helen Bart UK / 2021 / 60’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: BBC Studios

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Uprising is a vivid and visceral three-part series for BBC One which examines three events from 1981: in January, the New Cross Fire which killed 13 Black teenagers; in March, Black People’s Action Day, which saw more than 20,000 people join the first organised mass protest by Black British people; and then the Brixton riots in April. The series reveals how these events intertwined in the early months of 1981, and how, in the process, race relations were defined for a generation. The New Cross Fire remains one of the biggest losses of life in a house fire in modern British history. What happened and how Britain responded is a story that has been waiting to be told in depth for 40 years. For the first time, survivors and key participants give their account of the fire, the aftermath, the impact it had on the historic events of 1981 and the profound legacy it left behind. The first part of the series will screen at Sheffield DocFest.

Special Screenings

Into the World Sheffield DocFest’s Into the World strand showcases essential films with urgent themes that take varied approaches to exploring our past, present, and collective future. It is a strand that is about all of us. Covering the distant, the close, the intimate, and the political, it explores the world’s infinite appearances, challenges, dangers, and fights. In Delphine’s Prayers, Cameroonian filmmaker Rosine Mbakam invites us to be present for the telling of her friend Delphine’s story. Delphine’s courageous and strong voice illuminates the screen.

In The Return: Life After ISIS, Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra meets a group of women from Canada, US, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK, who are now held in a detention camp in Syria. Having married members of ISIS, these women have lost everything, but is it right that they are forced to sacrifice so much for mistakes they made in the past? Thanks to this film, we can finally hear their own side of the story. In Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, American filmmakers Emily and Sarah Kunstler draw a map of the history of anti-Black racism in the United States.

Starting from a groundbreaking talk by Jeffery Robinson, Director of the Trone Center for Justice and Equality, the film’s thesis is illustrated through a mix of interviews and archival footage.

Argentinian filmmaker Natalia Garayalde was 12 years old when the Rio Tercero Military Factory exploded in her hometown. Based on her own video recordings from before, during, and after the tragedy, through Splinters, she offers a unique testimony on the life and wounds of her family, revealing a sinister truth that sheds light on the cause of the destruction.

The story of Black activist, feminist, poet, lawyer and priest Pauli Murray is told mainly through Murray’s own words in American filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s My Name is Pauli Murray, a rare portrait of the pioneering figure who fought for gender equality and social justice.

Dilma Rousseff was the president of Brazil from 2011 until 2016. In Alvorada Palace, Brazilian filmmakers Anna Muylaert and Lo Politi followed Rousseff as she faced an impeachment trial in a country that has since shifted radically to the far right, a political situation many consider to be an ongoing nightmare.

This film shows Rousseff’s fight for democracy. Having made a film in 1991 along the Oder and Neisse rivers on the German-Polish border, German filmmaker Andreas Voigt is familiar with the place and people he is filming in Borderland. In the present day, he instigates new encounters in the same landscape but in a different time.

Time has passed since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and Mikhail Gorbachev has now retired, living in a beautiful mansion. In Gorbachev, Heaven, Russian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky meets him for an uncompromising talk covering the life and career of this old giant.

In 2008, British filmmaker Luke Holland began interviewing the last living generation of Germans that participated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. More than a decade later, Holland has created Final Account, a raw and urgent document that reflects – in the most direct and personal way – on the question of how everyday citizens took part in one of the biggest human crimes of all time.

Israeli filmmaker Avi Mograbi reflects on, and denounces, Israeli policy, taking particular focus on the ongoing military occupation of the Palestinian territories. Acting himself (as he often does), and drawing from testimonies from soldiers, he proposes to us: The First 54 Years – An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation. In order to create a detailed depiction of the emotions of sufferers of Minamata disease, as well as the lawyers and scientists who are struggling to resolve the problem, Japanese veteran filmmaker Kazuo Hara filmed MINAMATA Mandala over a 15 year period. His three part documentary raises questions that are essential considerations for all human beings.

In Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight, British filmmaker Nick Green tells Ghosn’s story – who was once one of the most influential businessmen in automobile manufacturing – building a portrait of him through an extended interview, and by using archive material and other testimonies. In The Savior For Sale: The Story of the Salvator Mundi, French journalist Antoine Vitkine delves into the unknown secrets of the art world and explores the personal and geopolitical influence that one painting can have, weaving links between New York auction Houses and art dealers, an opportunistic swiss go-between, a Russian oligarch and a Saudi Arabian prince.

With In the Shadow of 9/11, British filmmaker Dan Reed examines the moral panic that took place in the US following the September 11 terrorist attacks, as well as the FBI’s subsequent search to uncover the “enemy within”. What If god were a woman is the question that Laura asks in a generous film about gender transformation by Colombian filmmaker Angelica Cervera Aguirre. Tomorrow We’ll See says Italian filmmaker Lorenzo Vitrone as he films a family under lockdown, while Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang films a little boy playing under lockdown in the World of Mindfulness.

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— Agnès Wildenstein

Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight Director(s): Nick Green Producer(s): Nora Melhli France, Lebanon, UK / 2021 / 99’ / World Premiere / English, French, Japanese

In December 2019, Carlos Ghosn – the former CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance charged with various financial crimes – stunned the world by fleeing Japan in an escape worthy of a Hollywood thriller. What triggered his downfall from celebrated industry leader to international fugitive? Ghosn claims that he fell victim to a conspiracy involving Nissan executives and members of the Japanese government, but the charges against him are hard to ignore. Through interviews, archival footage, and exclusive access to Carlos Ghosn and his wife Carole, Nick Green’s documentary draws a portrait of a fascinating character, shedding light on this complex and multilayered story while also divulging new details on his spectacular escape to Lebanon.

Sales: MBC

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Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

Into the World

Family Life

Zing Nim Sai Gaai / The World of Mindfulness Director(s): Ying Liang Producer(s): Jeremy Chua, Peng Shan Hong Kong / 2021 / 15’ / World Premiere / Cantonese, English, Mandarin

During the pandemic, the filmmaker’s son found himself stuck at home for a very long time. Ying Liang watched him cut out a portrait of Abbas Kiarostami from a book, and create a face mask on the face of the Iranian filmmaker. Liang observes how his son builds a ‘world’ on his bed, makes a paper airplane, and flies various places with his new friend Abbas Kiarostami. After spending the whole day flying, he falls asleep on that same bed with the family’s kitten. In his dreams, he uses the ‘magic’ he has learned from an online magic course to remove the face mask. With The World of Mindfulness, Chinese filmmaker Liang – who is now living in Hong Kong – creates a marvellously simple piece about the world of childhood, adding a touch of playful cinephilia.

Sales: Pōtocol 70

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Domani si vedrà / Tomorrow We’ll See Director(s): Lorenzo Vitrone Producer(s): Camilla Ricci Italy / 2020 / 21’ / UK Premiere / Italian

Luigina is a nurse who lives with her husband Marco and her three children, Lorenzo, Tommaso and Giulia in the outskirts of Rome. Each morning, before the rest of her family have woken up, Luigina gets up to go to work. With the outbreak of the pandemic, hospital work becomes a risk. Every day she comes home not knowing whether she has been infected. Luigina is afraid but she hides this fear in front of her children, who are intrigued by these strange new days where the schools are closed and they can watch television all day. Luigina will find comfort in Lorenzo, her eldest son, to whom she can confess her fears. Smiles from her loved ones and the support of her husband Marco will keep her moving forward, despite her fears for the future. All that matters is staying together; tomorrow is another day.

Sales: Camilla Ricci

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

Si dios fuera mujer / If god were a woman

Director(s): Angélica Cervera Producer(s): Alexander Arbelaez Colombia / 2021 / 71’ / World Premiere / Spanish

Laura lives with her parents in L’Alfàz del Pi, a small town in the autonomous community of Valencia, in Spain. She likes to sing and is a fan of Ariana Grande.

Three years ago, she started her transition. Despite the difficulties, her family, friends, and schoolmates support her desire. Now, her dream is to have her first communion. Laura’s mother starts to make preparations, despite having no certainty as to whether the church will grant Laura her wish. Her father tries to adapt to the situation, but he is nostalgic, missing the memories he has of that boy who is no longer there. Laura is about to face adolescence, and with it, a series of changes that will mean a new chapter for her and her family, alongside the uncertainty and fear that each decision they make can be definitive.

Sales: Monociclo Cine

Nominated for: the First Feature and Youth Jury Award

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Fighting for Democracy

Party Line Director(s): Lydia Cornett Producer(s): Lydia Cornett USA / 2020 / 7’ / International Premiere / English

Before 2020, Ohio had voted for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. Franklin County, the liberal stronghold and most populated county in the state, faced its share of challenges in November 2020: errors in absentee ballots, record in-person early voting turnout, and a polarising political climate with rising coronavirus numbers. Party Line documents the experience of those who waited in line to ensure their votes were counted, revealing a public event that encompasses everything from last-minute political campaigning to a dance party in a hailstorm. As individuals from all walks of life wait in line, contradicting ideologies come into collision and community finds various forms.

Sales: Lydia Cornett

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Alvorada / Alvorada Palace Director(s): Anna Muylaert, Lô Politi Producer(s): Ivan Melo Brazil / 2020 / 80’ / European Premiere / Portuguese

Sales: cupfilmes

Located in Brasilia, the nation’s capital, and designed by the famous architect Oscar Niemeyer, the Palácio da Alvorada (Dawn Palace) is the official residence of the president of Brazil. Workers Party member Dilma Rousseff was the president of Brazil from 2011 until 2016.

Alvorada follows Rousseff and her closest members of staff over the days that lead up to the impeachment trial that resulted in her downfall. Rousseff’s sharp mind, her strength, and her charisma radiate within this magnificent environment, but she is aware of the image she wants to convey, and sometimes she does not want to be filmed.

Thanks to the efforts of filmmakers Muylaert and Politi, we are granted remarkable access to an important and dramatic piece of contemporary Brazilian history from an insider’s perspective, able to hear Rousseff talk candidly about politics, history, literature, and the impeachment process that her opposition are orchestrating against her.

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Final Account Director(s): Luke Holland Producer(s): John Battsek, Riete Oord, Luke Holland Germany, UK / 2019 / 90’ / UK Premiere / German

Sales: Universal

In 2008, British filmmaker Luke Holland began interviewing the last living generation of Germans that participated in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. These were the young men and women who became SS members, Wehrmacht fighters, concentration camp guards, and silent civilian witnesses. More than a decade later, Holland has created a raw and urgent document that reflects, in the most direct and personal way, on the question of how ordinary human beings took part in one of the most horrendous of human crimes. As Holland mixes indepth witness statements, archival material and current footage, what comes to the fore is a portrait of how rapidly moral norms can evaporate and how myths and denial come to fill the resulting vacuum. Final Account reverberates with our times – examining the perils of authority, conformity, national identity, and ideological mythmaking, laying bare both the dark fog and piercing clarity of human memory.

Горбачев. Рай / Gorbachev, Heaven Director(s): Vitaly Mansky Producer(s): Natalia Manskaia Czech Republic, Latvia / 2020 / 100’ / UK Premiere / Russian

In Gorbachev, Heaven, Vitaly Mansky encounters one of the most titanic figures of 20th century history.

From his secluded estate on the outskirts of Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev reflects on the major battles of his life through a series of contentious conversations with Mansky. He struggles with the effects of his age. By capturing Gorbachev’s reflections on his own role in the dissolution of the USSR, Mansky offers a glimpse into the shocking psychological life of this figure: this is a man who has, through necessity, shut-off a part of himself from the outside world, whose core is near impenetrable. That Gorbachev’s reforms precipitated the collapse of the USSR is an irony that, seemingly, he will forever have to steel himself against.

Sales: Deckert Distribution

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Grenzland / Borderland Director(s): Andreas Voigt Producer(s): Barbara Etz, Klaus Schmutzer, Kazimierz Beer Germany, Poland / 2020 / 97’ / International Premiere / English, German, Polish

Sales: Barbara Etz Filmproduction

Few filmmakers could make a film about the internal borders of Europe with the authority of Andreas Voigt, one of the pivotal DEFA documentarians working at the time of the collapse of the socialist project in Eastern Germany. Three decades after making his first film about the region, Voigt returns to the borderlands where the outer limits of Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic intersect. He encounters a people with a porous cultural identity, where family histories are intertwined with an array of dialects and legacies. The key is the word borderland over border: this is a space of invisible cultural osmosis, the exact start and end point of which can not be easily located. As in Voigt’s earlier work, the stories that these regular people recount – covering their aspirations, work, the divergences of their family members – give way to a far more idiosyncratic portrait of a place, and an era.

In The Shadow of 9/11 Director(s): Dan Reed Producer(s): Marguerite Gaudin Dominican Republic, Haiti, USA / 2021 / 110’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Abacus Media

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In The Shadow of 9/11 tells a bizarre story of the US Government’s watershed post-9/11 domestic counter-terror sting operation. The subject of sustained, frantic press coverage, hailed as a major counter-terror victory by the US Attorney General at the time, the case of the ‘Liberty City Seven’ has largely been forgotten. The problem for these ‘terrorists’, and with many of the FBI’s counter-terror ‘sting’ cases is that the defendants had no contact whatsoever with any terrorist organisation. In the words of Rod Vereen, one of the defence attorneys: “The FBI invented the players, they invented the theme, they invented how it was gonna go down. They wrote this script…” Questioning the diversion of huge federal resources and labour away from crime-fighting into counter-terror cases involving no actual terrorists, the film sheds light on troubling methods of the FBI’s post-9/11 hunt for domestic terrorists which has perversely increased the public’s fear of terrorism while making the country less safe for those who live there.

Into the World

Les prières de Delphine / Delphine’s Prayers Director(s): Rosine Mbakam Producer(s): Tandor Production - Geoffroy Cernaix Belgium, Cameroon / 2021 / 90’ / UK Premiere / French Delphine’s Prayers is a portrait of Delphine, a Cameroonian woman who, by the age of 13, had lost her mother, been abandoned by her father, and had been raped.

First turning to sex work to support herself, Delphine later married a Belgian man more than three times her age in the hope of finding a better life in Europe for herself and her daughter. Seven years after her marriage, the European dream has dissipated, and her situation has worsened. This is where the third feature film from Cameroonian-born, Belgium-based filmmaker Rosine Mbakam begins. Mbakam joins Delphine in her Brussels apartment, as she engages Mbakam, the camera, and the viewer in a frank and direct address. With a strong, sensitive voice, Delphine tells her life story with palpable emotion and frequent anger. Her unusual energy and courage consume the confined space that she inhabits.

Delphine’s voice is essential, and this film belongs to her.

Sales: CBA

Nominated for: the Youth Jury Award

MINAMATA Mandala 1, 2 & 3 Director(s): Kazuo Hara Producer(s): Sachiko Kobayahi, Kazuo Hara, Noa Nagaoka, Chihiro Shimano Japan / 2020 / 372’ / UK Premiere / Japanese

Sales: Media Space Inc

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As early as 1937, the Chisso Corporation began dumping toxic waste into the waters of a fishing village in Minamata, Japan. This initiated a form of often-fatal methylmercury poisoning in the local population – now known as Minamata disease – which causes paralysis, loss of eyesight, damage to hearing, and neurological disorders. Even though Minamata disease was officially certified in 1977, many sufferers are yet to have their affliction properly recognised.

In MINAMATA Mandala, Kazuo Hara tracks the seemingly endless legal struggles of several victims of the disease, as they battle in the courts for compensation and fair treatment, being met, at every turn, with the bureaucratic obstinance and indifference of state institutions. Throughout this epic, 15-year journey and three-part film, Hara treats each individual and the local community with tremendous empathy, and raises necessary global questions about public health, corporate accountability, and the environment.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

My Name is Pauli Murray Director(s): Betsy West, Julie Cohen Producer(s): Talleah Bridges McMahon USA / 2021 / 91’ / European Premiere / English Fifteen years before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat, and a decade before the US Supreme Court overturned separate-but-equal legislation, Pauli Murray was already heavily involved in the battle for social justice. A pioneering Black attorney, activist, priest, poet and memoirist, Murray shaped landmark litigation – and consciousness – around race and gender equity.

Both Pauli’s personal path and tireless advocacy foreshadowed some of the most politically consequential issues of our time. As an African American youth raised in the segregated South – who was also wrestling with broader notions of gender identity – Pauli understood what it meant to exist beyond previously accepted categories and cultural norms. Told largely in Murray’s own words, this filmic portrait reveals a tenacious spirit.

Pauli Murray is a name you will not forget.

The First 54 Years – an Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation Director(s): Avi Mograbi Producer(s): Camille Laemlé , Serge Lalou France, Finland, Germany, Israel / 2021 / 110’ / UK Premiere / English, French, German, Hebrew

Sales: The Party Film Sales

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The Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories has lasted 54 years. How is it possible to describe a conflict which is seemingly without end? From his living room, Avi Mograbi adopts the role of classroom teacher, providing insights into the functioning of a colonialist occupation and the shifting, sometimes self-contradictory modes of thought needed to sustain it. Working from material provided by ‘Breaking the Silence’ – an organisation through which veteran soldiers from the Israeli army expose the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories – alongside archive footage from varying sources, such as TV news broadcasts and amateur Palestinian video, Mograbi uses Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a case study, mapping out a ‘Manual for Military Occupation’.

Into the World

The Return: Life After ISIS Director(s): Alba Sotorra Clua Producer(s): Alba Sotorra Clua, Vesna Cudic Spain, UK / 2021 / 85’ / European Premiere / English

Sales: MetFilm Sales

A unique portrait of a group of Western women whose teenage years were spent supporting ISIS, but who now want to return to their countries and transform their lives. Among them are Shamima Begum, who travelled to Syria from the UK when she was 15, and Hoda Muthana, an American accused of encouraging her Twitter following to support the Islamic State. As part of a workshop, Sevinaz, a young Kurdish woman, who herself has lost friends and family to ISIS, invites the women to write letters to their former selves. Reviled by the media, they accept the challenge and tell their true stories for the first time. Filmed over a year in the high-security Camp Roj in Syria, The Return: Life After ISIS explores a question with no easy answers: what future do the thousands of former supporters of ISIS have, now that their home countries do not want them back?

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

The Savior For Sale: The Story of the Salvator Mundi Director(s): Antoine Vitkine Producer(s): Antoine Viktine France / 2021 / 95’ / UK Premiere / English, French

Sales: mk2 Films

Weaving links between New York’s auction houses and art dealers, a revered British Leonardo da Vinci expert, one opportunistic Swiss go-between, a Russian oligarch, London’s Tate Gallery, Le Musée du Louvre in Paris, and a Saudi Arabian prince, journalist Antoine Vitkine delves into the secrets of the art world, and explores the influence that one painting can have. After mysteriously appearing, a painting titled Salvator Mundi (The Savior of the World) was sold at Christie’s auction house, for a record 450 million US dollars in 2017. Attributed to Leonardo da Vinci after its discovery, what became the most expensive piece of art ever has unleashed passions, while revealing the excesses of our time. Journeying along the hidden trails of money, power, and deception lying behind this questionable masterpiece, this film asks: is this really the work of the Italian genius, or one of the greatest scams in the history of art?

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Two Films from Argentina

Homenaje a la obra de Philip Henry Gosse / Homage to the work of Philip Henry Gosse Director(s): Pablo Martin Weber Producer(s): Pablo Martin Weber Argentina / 2020 / 22’ / European Premiere / Spanish

Sales: Periferia Cine

Philip H. Gosse was a British naturalist, and a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin. He was obsessed with fossils – particularly corals – which contextualised his fascination with the creation of life on earth, and how such a historical record compared to the creation myths proffered in Christianity, through the Bible. Using images and sounds from his own personal archives, and taking a broad approach to his subject matter – including insights into artificial intelligence, the philosophical theory of positivism, and even H.P. Lovecraft – Pablo Martin Weber builds a poetic fim essay, which has as its consistent thread a genuine passion for science, and a regard for the figure of Philip Henry Gosse. Ultimately, the film approaches its topic something like a metaphysical inquiry, linking the past to the present, so that we might think creatively about the future.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

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Esquirlas / Splinters Director(s): Natalia Garayalde Producer(s): Eva Cáceres Argentina / 2020 / 70’ / UK Premiere / Spanish

Sales: Punto de Fuga Cine

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On November 3rd, 1995, the Río Tercero Military Factory in Argentina exploded. This caused thousands of projectiles to go off and disperse over the surrounding towns, a tragedy that would leave seven casualties and hundreds of wounded. At that time, Natalia Garayalde was a 12-year-old girl living with her family near the factory. Playing with the video camera her father had bought for her, she recorded the moments after the blast while her family escaped, before continuing to record the everyday activities in the days and weeks that followed. Twenty-five years later, that footage captured through the candid point-of-view of a girl playing pretend journalists with her sister becomes a thoughtful, painful testimony about a family, the destruction of a city, the traces of horror, the sinister truth about the case, and the wounds that are hard to heal.

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington and the Youth Jury Award

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America Director(s): Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler Producer(s): Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler, Jeffrey Robinson USA / 2021 / 117’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Sarah Kunstler

In the Town Hall Theater on Broadway in New York City, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Jeffery Robinson faces a large audience in a groundbreaking talk on the history of anti-Black racism in the United States of America. Robinson’s words are powerful, weaving together heartbreak, humour, passion and rage. Using this talk as a starting point, Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America interweaves historical archive and present-day footage with interviews that tell Robinson’s own personal story, chronicling Robinson’s meetings with Black change-makers and eyewitnesses to history. From a hanging tree in Charleston, South Carolina, to a walking tour of the origins of slavery in colonial New York, to the site of a 1947 lynching in rural Alabama, the film presents the enduring legacy of white supremacy, and our collective responsibility to overcome it.

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Rebellions The global pandemic of the past 15 months has shone a light on the unjust systems of power and rapacious forms of exploitation that define the contemporary world. With these inescapable revelations, there also comes a clear and unambiguous need for rebellion.

In an era that will be remembered both for an unimaginable force majeure, and a global reckoning with hierarchy, inequality and domination, mass movements and collective actions have been essential survival strategies, transmitted around the world largely through visual media.

The increase in attention on the Movement for Black Lives following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others in the summer of 2020 led to a widespread conversation about anti-Blackness, police violence, and prison abolition that transcends the boundaries of the US. In a focus on the Black liberationist organisation MOVE, we present three films. Ash Goh Hua’s I’m Free Now, You Are Free is an intimate exploration of the effect of incarceration on MOVE member Debbie Africa and her son, who was born in prison.

The UK premiere of the uncompromisingly radical, previously suppressed 1980 film MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia, shot on the ground during one of the many raids against the group, gives historical and ideological context to their struggle. Lastly, Ephraim Asili’s first feature The Inheritance explores the legacy of radical communal living, making allegorical reference to Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, and centering the story of MOVE and the legacy of the Black Arts Movement.

Vincent Meessen’s exploration of the legacy of Senegalese Marxist revolutionary Omar Blondin Diop Just A Movement also references Godard’s film, pointing to the global nature of Pan-African liberation struggle. The grieving families of people lost to police violence in Ohio give testimony and demonstrate resistance in They Won’t Call It Murder, and young people of colour in a suburb of Lisbon resist stereotypes of criminality by telling their own stories, their own way, in Chelas nha Kau. Images of crackdowns on protest in the name of public health have become a common part of our collective psyche, and many films have captured this phenomenon with a cinematic sensibility. David Dufrense’s The Monopoly of Violence, a philosophical exploration of the police’s response to protest in France, demonstrates that the problem of police violence – while disproportionately affecting the non-white population – is one that affects us all.

Using a kind of playful performativity, Thomas Bauer’s Fixed Barricade at Hamdalaye Crossing stages a pastiche of a legal proceeding as a method for processing the slow response to a massacre of protestors in Guinea in 2009. In Belarus, the story of a mass movement demonstrating against political repression and election fraud is told through the involvement of an underground theatre troupe in Courage.

The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant offers a whimsical, historical outline of the Civil War and the white supremacy inherent to the Confederacy. It is preceded by Ancient Sunshine, a reflection on alternative collectivist ways of organising and the notion of horizontality as a poetic and political tool.

Contemporary resistance is also informed by historical struggles. The Silence of The Mole shows the courage of a man who infiltrated the terror regime in Guatemala and saved the lives of those fighting for freedom, whilst Narcissus Off Duty spends time with the great singer Caetano Veloso, as he recalls his time spent in prison during the military dictatorship in Brazil. In Brazil Is Thee Haiti Is (T)here, we discover the links between military crimes committed in Haiti by the Brazilian army and those who are today in power in Brazil. In Riverock, Paula Gaitán spends hours with Afro-Brazilian musician, poet, and sociologist Negro Léo as he discusses music, religion and the far-right politics of the country.

Dear Elnaz is a protest but also a direct confrontation with the Iranian government and the crime that was committed in which a civilian airplane was shot down by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

From intimate personal pain to a form of collective anger, the film makes a call for justice and truth: categories that need to be filled with new bonds of trust and transparency. Short and disquieting, Civil War Surveillance Poems offers insights into the mindset of many US citizens, while in E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs links the classic film to recent attacks on the US Capitol by right-wing activists.

Two Minutes to Midnight brings some hope to the equation, asking us: why can’t just try again, only in a different way?

The films in Rebellions illuminate cinema’s role in documenting – and tangibly contributing to – the myriad forms of resistance that continue to persist worldwide, pandemic or not.

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— Rabz Lansiquot and Cíntia Gil

Barrage d’arrêt fixe et fermé au niveau du carrefour Hamdalaye / Fixed Barricade at Hamdalaye Crossing Director(s): Thomas Bauer Producer(s): Judith Abensour France, Guinea / 2020 / 70’ / International Premiere / French, Fulfulde

Sales: Poteau d’angle

In Conakry, Guinea, on September 28th 2009, the day of the first stage of the presidential election, security forces massacred 157 people at the Stade du 28 Septembre, the city’s main sports stadium. In 2018, filmmaker Thomas Bauer met a group of young plaintiffs who, frustrated by a lethargic official judicial process, set up rehearsals for the staging of a hypothetical trial on a terrace overlooking the city. Through mimesis, memory, and testimony, they readjust the jargon of the French legal system, using the processes of performance to establish a sense of togetherness, and to piece together the case as a form of both investigation and catharsis.

Sounds and sights in the surrounding city punctuate their production. What emerges is both an exploration of how to reckon with histories of violence and injustice, as well as an effective allegory for officially orchestrated forms of political theatre.

Nominated for: the First Feature Award

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Brazil: Stories of Music and Pain

O que Há em Ti / Brazil Is Thee Haiti Is (T)here Director(s): Carlos Adriano Producer(s): Carlos Adriano Brazil / 2020 / 16’ / UK Premiere / English, French, Haitian, Portuguese

Sales: Babushka

On March 16th 2020 in Brazil’s capital, Brasília, an anonymous Haitian man challenged the chief of the nation: “Bolsonaro, it’s over. You are not the President anymore.”

This film-poem is a counterpoint between this act of protest, and the two catastrophic military operations held by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, commanded by Brazil, on July 6th 2005, and on December 22nd 2006, in Cité Soleil (a commune within Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince). Brazil is thee Haiti is (t)here summons the song ‘Haiti’ (1993) by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, alongside various cultural works related to the country: the poem O Guesa (1888) by Brazilian Sousândrade, the Bur-Jargal (1826) by Victor Hugo, Haiti’s first feature Haiti: the way of liberty (1974) by Arnold Antonin Haiti: the way of liberty (1974) by Arnold Antonin, and a suspended project by Sergei Eisenstein and Paul Robeson about Toussaint Louverture.

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Narciso em Férias / Narcissus Off Duty Director(s): Ricardo Calil, Renato Terra Producer(s): Paula Lavigne Brazil / 2020 / 84’ / UK Premiere / Portuguese

Sales: VideoFilmes Produções Artísticas LTDA

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In Narcissus Off Duty, internationally-renowned musician Caetano Veloso gives testimony about his twomonth imprisonment at the hands of the military dictatorship in power in Brazil in 1968. This minimalist exercise in spoken memory richly describes the psychological tactics of military violence practiced during his incarceration, alongside new information about why he was detained, which sheds light on the arbitrary brutality of the time and documents the terror-tactics of the extreme right-wing. Through a mix of oral storytelling, song, and the reading of documents, a precise dramatic balance is achieved. Benefiting from the discursive ability of this charismatic Brazilian artist, the film is a courageous and lyrical audiovisual documentation from the archives of a Brazilian military dictatorship that lasted 21 years, made timely by the fact that Brazil now lives again through a militaristic government, and a rise of the extreme right.

Rebellions

Chelas nha Kau Director(s): Bagabaga Studios, Bataclan 1950 Producer(s): José Magro, Diogo Cardoso Portugal / 2020 / 57’ / International Premiere / Creole, Portuguese

Chelas nha Kau reflects the lives and realities of Bataclan 1950, a group of friends from Zona J – a low-income suburb of Lisbon – who use rap music as a means to express their identity. Shot across three years, and emerging from a workshop with multimedia cooperative Bagabaga Studios, the film was made by the same young people that it features. Its polyphonic nature rejects both the hierarchy of auteur cinema, and the prejudices conveyed in Portuguese media, which disparage an already marginalised community with stereotypes of danger and criminality. Chelas nha Kau is a film that reveals the various layers of what it means to be young and living in a social housing project, from the personal perspectives of Bataclan 1950 and their own musical, visual, and cultural language.

Sales: José Magro

Courage Director(s): Aliaksei Paluyan Producer(s): Jörn Möllenkamp Belarus, Germany / 2021 / 89’ / UK Premiere / Belarusian, Russian

Sales: Rise And Shine World Sales

During the contested 2020 presidential elections in Belarus, three actors from an underground theatre in Minsk are caught-up in the wake of mass protests disputing the legitimacy of Alexander Lukashenko’s sixth term. It draws them onto the open streets of Minsk to protest for freedom of speech and the long-awaited change of power, but the people’s voice is brutally crushed by the regime’s security apparatus. Members of the theatre group are arrested, and the country is on the brink of civil war. The film brings together stunning footage from the front lines of the demonstrations and an exploration of the lives of the hopeful and creative people who participated. Courage accompanies the brave and peaceful resistance of Maryna, Pavel and Denis in the lead up to – and during – the protests, and offers a deep personal insight into the Belarus of today.

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

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Elnaz Jan / Dear Elnaz Director(s): Mania Akbari Producer(s): Javad Soleimani Canada / 2021 / 83’ / UK Premiere / Farsi

Sales: Cryptofiction

On January 8th 2020, Ukrainian Airlines’ flight PS752 was shot down by the Iranian regime. All 176 passengers and crew on board lost their lives. Javad Soleimani lost the love of his life, Elnaz Nabiyi. By concluding that the plane crash occurred only due to technical defects, the Iranian regime lied about the real reasons for this heinous crime, until, under international pressure, they were forced to accept responsibility for firing upon a civilian aircraft. In this film, the camera’s role as an observer gradually becomes Javad’s primary channel for seeking justice, as his friends and a film crew accompany him through a process of mourning and healing. Javad’s anger and sorrow gradually shifts towards a loud cry for justice, as his memories, and his quest for truth, merge to form a unique and powerful political gesture.

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

Juste un mouvement / Just A Movement Director(s): Vincent Meessen Producer(s): Geneviève de Bauw Belgium, France / 2021 / 110’ / UK Premiere / Chinese, French

Just a Movement takes Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film La Chinoise as its starting point, reallocating its roles and characters, and transferring its questions and historical legacy from Paris to contemporary Dakar, Senegal. Filmmaker Vincent Meessen’s take on Godard’s film offers a meditation on the relationship between politics, justice, and memory, through a political and poetic inquiry into the legacy of Omar Blondin Diop, the Maoist student and militant who played himself in La Chinoise, later dying in a Senegalese prison in 1973.

Using interviews with Diop’s brothers and friends, and scenes from – and inspired by – La Chinoise, Meessen constructs an interplay between history and cinema, past and present, all while recognising the complex relations between China and Africa that inflect the situations depicted. What emerges is an exploration of Diop’s enduring legacy in Senegal; one that exceeds the bounds of a typical biographical portrait.

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Let’s Start Again

Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1) Director(s): Mitch McCabe Producer(s): Mitch McCabe USA / 2020 / 15’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Company Chipped Nails Pictures, Inc.

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The first iteration of a five-part feature film of speculative experimental nonfiction, which contemplates an imaginary, impending American civil war via call-in radio, 20 years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots. The film is partly a nostalgic political travelogue and partly a pre-war surveillance record, deconstructing our past, future and present political moment, with its clashing ideologies. Mitch McCabe began the film in 2018 as part political warning, part science fiction. But as the events of 2020 unfolded, the film’s themes evolved and developed, responding to the racial, economic and geo-political inequities and divides that were emphasised by the pandemic, its fallout, and the US election. Appropriately, the film ends in Michigan, following rallies, protests and militias during the months leading up to the election, its aftermath, and the clashes that took place in response to the counting of the vote.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo Director(s): Lynne Sachs Producer(s): Lynne Sachs, Punto de Vista, International Documentary Film Festival USA, Spain / 2021 / 9’ / UK Premiere / English

In a cinema letter to Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the French filmmaker’s 1933 classic Zéro de conduite, in which school boys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how both innocent play and calculated protest can quickly turn into chaos and violence.

Sales: KINO REBELDE

Two Minutes to Midnight Director(s): Yael Bartana Producer(s): Yael Bartana, Naama Pyritz Germany, Netherlands / 2021 / 47’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Yael Bartana

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A group of actors gathers on a stage. They play the all-female government of an imaginary nation. In light of the looming threat posed by an enemy country that is increasing its nuclear stockpiles, the government assembles in its Peace Room – so named as an inversion of Dr. Strangelove’s War Room, because here, peace is preferable to war. In considering whether to proceed with their plans for unilateral disarmament, the government consults with female experts: real-life specialists, defense advisers, soldiers, lawyers, peace activists, humanitarians, and politicians. As they exchange ideas about war, security, and inequality, their discussion ranges across the global emergencies of our patriarchal world. Tensions escalate with the enemy nation: the country’s leader is a man obsessed with the size of his rocket, and he seems determined to prove that his big red button really works. Two Minutes to Midnight is the final stage of a four year transdisciplinary series: ‘What if Women Ruled the World?’

Rebellions

Life Is Our Revolutionary Priority

I’m Free Now, You Are Free

Director(s): Ash Goh Hua Producer(s): Arielle Knight USA / 2020 / 15’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Ash Goh

I’m Free Now, You Are Free is a short documentary about the reunion and repair between Mike Africa Jr and his mother Debbie Africa – a formerly incarcerated political prisoner of the MOVE9. In 1978, Debbie, then 8 months pregnant, and many other MOVE family members were arrested after an attack by the Philadelphia Police Department; born in a prison cell, Mike Africa Jr. spent just three days with his mother before guards wrenched him away, and they spent the next 40 years struggling for freedom and for each other. In 2018, Mike Africa Jr. successfully organized to have his parents released on parole. “I realized that I had never seen her feet before,” was a remark he made when he reflected on Debbie’s homecoming.

This film meditates on Black family preservation as resistance against the brutal legacies of state sanctioned family separation.

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Move: Confrontation in Philadelphia Director(s): Karen Pomer, Jane Mancini Producer(s): Karen Pomer, Jane Mancini USA / 1980 / 62’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Karen Pomer

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The MOVE Organization is a family of committed revolutionaries, founded by John Africa in 1972. Life is their priority, and caring for life forms the core of their beliefs. “We know how threatening our message is to those in power and why they come down so hard on us. We expect it and we are prepared for it,” said Africa. MOVE members survived two catastrophic attacks from the Philadelphia police within the span of 10 years, resulting in members – including children – being imprisoned and murdered. First-time filmmakers Karen Pomer and Jane Mancini risked their lives to record on the ground during the August 8 1978 police siege of the MOVE home in Powelton Village by police. After that, they spent more than two and a half years researching and assembling this testimony.

Rebellions

Monopoly of Violence

They Won’t Call It Murder

Director(s): Melissa Gira Grant, Ingrid Raphaël Producer(s): Ruun Nuur, Chase Whiteside USA / 2021 / 24’ / World Premiere / English

Police have been killing people in Columbus, Ohio, with near impunity for more than two decades, leaving behind a community bound together by grief – and a system that refuses to call these killings murder. In a searing indictment of the police and justice system at large, educator and curator Ingrid Raphael and journalist Melissa Gira Grant have collaborated in this short film, which spotlights the testimonies and resistance strategies of the loved ones of Henry Green, Tyre King, Donna Dalton and Julius Tate. These are the mothers, sisters, and grandmothers of those who were killed by Columbus police, women seeking justice for their family members, despite knowing that it is unlikely to be found within the system that caused their wrongful deaths.

Sales: Field of Vision 92

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Un pays qui se tient sage / The Monopoly of Violence Director(s): David Dufresne Producer(s): Bertrand Faivre France / 2020 / 87’ / UK Premiere / French In this stimulating – sometimes shocking – documentary about police violence in France, filmmaker and journalist David Dufresne examines the ways in which a government comes to justify brutal acts enacted against its own citizenry. Taking its title from sociologist and political economist Max Weber – who wrote that the state establishes a “monopoly on violence” by claiming the legitimate use of force – Dufresne’s film mixes footage of attacks on protestors (largely on protestors from the gilets jaunes, or ‘yellow vest’ movement), and interviews with intellectuals, police officers, and victims of police assault. Providing practical and necessary tools to identify and confront the normalization of real threats to democratic protest, The Monopoly of Violence shows the dangers of police serving the state rather than the people, while identifying a growing tendency among Western democracies to resort to totalitarian methods to keep the populace under their control.

Sales: The Bureau Sales

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington Award

É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo / Riverock

Director(s): Paula Gaitán Producer(s): Vitor Graize, Paula Gaitán, Eryk Rocha Brazil / 2020 / 157’ / UK Premiere / Portuguese

Sales: Pique-Bandeira Filmes

Intimately shot in his home, and emerging somewhere between artist portrait and testimony, Riverock is a conversation with the musician, poet, sociologist and thinker Negro Leo. He articulates his ideas about the development of music, Brazilian and international politics, the ascension of neo-Pentecostal religions and his obsession with social media, all while making parallels with his own life and work. This film focuses not only on his ideas but on their evolution. Gaitán’s formal approach mirrors the shape of an improvised musical performance. Consisting of varying, shifting tones, and inflected with different rhythms, the film moves fluidly, allowing us to follow the multiple connections Leo makes between very different topics. Riverock is the latest in an extensive series of film portraits by Gaitán, which includes musician and performer Arto Lindsay, composer Eliane Radigue and filmmaker Agnès Varda.

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Territories

Ancient Sunshine Director(s): Jason Livingston Producer(s): Jason Livingston USA / 2020 / 19’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Jason Livingston

The Utah Tar Sands Resistance has been fighting experimental mining in the Tavaputs Plateau for almost a decade, setting up camp every summer in sight of heavy equipment and construction crews. Consisting of interviews with the Resistance’s primary organisers and other Utah land protectors, and setting their voices against images of the industrialised landscape, Ancient Sunshine investigates the decimation of the environment, and draws attention to the role of resistance and kinship during times of threat and extinction. Interweaving the endlessly remade myth of the American West with insights into labor history, reflections on anarchist organisation, and interspecies economies – such as animal husbandry – Ancient Sunshine probes the violence through which ‘earth’ becomes ‘resource’, and suggests ways of fostering solidarity against this process.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

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The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant Director(s): Jim Finn Producer(s): Cat Mazza USA / 2020 / 60’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Video Data Bank

Few films about the American Civil War reach the level of granular historical detail and formal playfulness as Jim Finn’s The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant, a musical fantasia that follows the path Grant took to liberate the southern United States from white supremacist occupation between 1861 and 1865. Shot in 16mm, in fields, swamps, and forests along this historical trail, the film treats these sites as wellsprings of visual and aural detail whose richness matches the abundance of information supplied in the accompanying voiceover. Finn’s facetious use of electronic synthesisers on the soundtrack, and plastic figurines taken from board games to recreate battles both major and minor, are shrewd techniques, giving shape to an unmistakable revulsion at the Confederate project – a project whose shadow, Finn seems to imply, American politics cannot step out from.

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The Inheritance Director(s): Ephraim Asili Producer(s): Vic Brooks, Ephraim Asili USA / 2020 / 100’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Ephraim Asili

Pennsylvania-born filmmaker Ephraim Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora – and his own place within it – for nearly a decade. His feature-length debut, The Inheritance, is a vibrant, engaging ensemble work that takes place almost entirely within the walls of a West Philadelphia house where a community of young people have come together to form a collective of Black artists and activists. Based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group, the film interweaves a scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, which was the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. The Inheritance is an endlessly generative work of politics, humour, and philosophy, referencing the legacies of the Black Arts Movement and featuring Black authors and radicals, members of MOVE, as well as poets Ursula Rucker and Sonia Sanchez.

Nominated for: the Youth Jury Award

El silencio del Topo / The Silence of The Mole Director(s): Anais Taracena Producer(s): Anais Taracena, Rafael González Guatemala / 2021 / 93’ / European Premiere / Spanish

Sales: Anais Taracena

Anais Taracena started filming Elías Barahona in 2014, when he was a witness in a trial for crimes against humanity that occurred during the civil war in Guatemala. Two weeks later, he died. Barahona was known as ‘The Mole’, a journalist who infiltrated the bowels of the most repressive government in Guatemala’s history, working for the Minister of Interior, Donaldo Ruiz. Unable to reveal his true political identity, and accused of being a traitor by his former comrades, he gains access to information about the political violence planned from the offices of the military government, and in doing so, is able to help the resistance. In Anais Taracena’s film, the search for this story immerses us in the memories of a country forced to forget. The revelations from the past open cracks in the walls of silence that surround Guatemala’s history – a history that remains largely obscured.

Nominated for: the Tim Hetherington and the Youth Jury Award

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Rhyme & Rhythm Film has a rich history of interacting and interlacing with other practices, and it is in Rhyme & Rhythm where cinema and other artforms meet: through Afro-Cuban music, chaâbi, choral singing, classical, new wave, no wave, pop, post-punk, and spoken word, via cabaret, drag, comic books, drawing, opera, poetry, skating, sports, and street dance.

Communities are built through music when pop star Charli XCX enlists the help of her fanbase to record a new album, collaboratively and virtually, in Alone Together; a filmmaker follows his father’s choir as they rehearse to perform for the first time in 20 years in Men Who Sing; while in Raymonde El Bidaouia, Israeli actor-turned-director Yaël Abecassis trails her mother, the legendary Moroccan singer, in an attempt to redefine their relationship.

The connective power of music transcends physical and ideological borders when the Vocal Vidas, an all-female a cappella group from Santiago de Cuba are invited to play their first show in America in Soy Cubana, while in BLONDIE: VIVIR EN LA HABANA, Debbie Harry and the New York new wave band collaborate with local musicians when they travel to Cuba. Underground filmmaker Beth B’s profile of counter culture icon Lydia Lunch centres on her radical words and confrontational performances as she takes to the stage for women’s rights, agency, and pleasure in The War Is Never Over, while filmmaker Michael Cumming and comedian Stewart Lee profile post-punk underdog Robert Lloyd from The Nightingales, who uses his voice to speak up for the working classes of midlands England in the anti-rockumentary King Rocker. Elsewhere, director and human rights activist Kim O’Bomsawin creates a tender portrait of Innu poet, writer, filmmaker and storyteller Josephine Bacon, as she tells us of her efforts to salvage and preserve her elders’ ways of thinking and traditions, which were stamped out by Canadian colonisation.

The worlds of music and cinema interweave when Vivian Ostrovsky muses on the role of music in Chantal Akerman’s films, and how she and cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton work together in Son Chant.

Sitting before Chantal Akerman, the world-famous cellist talks about her life and art in Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton. Tragicomic musical theatre and cinematic

cabaret combine in Roses, featuring Dakh Daughters from Ukraine whose multi-lingual and multi-instrumental performances explore their roles as women, artists, and citizens of a country living through times of revolution and war; while in Maisie, Britain’s oldest drag artiste, Maisie Trollette, prepares for the performance of a lifetime while battling Alzheimer’s.

In Gallant Indies, Contemporary dance overcomes social and cultural divides in Opéra Bastille’s production of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque masterpiece Les Indes Galantes, bringing together hiphop, krump, break, and voguing with classical opera.

In Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra, three Aboriginal brothers examine the loss and reclamation of culture and the burden of intergenerational trauma when they transform their young dance company into a First Nations powerhouse; while in Shelly Belly inna Real Life, artist and choreographer Cecilia Bengolea collaborates with the dancehall scene of Jamaica to capture the cultural influences within the Caribbean island art community through movement and music.

Through sport, we travel to Egypt, where 14-year-old Zebiba is training to become a weightlifting champion in Lift like a Girl, back to the UK for Stormskater, where Ishariah Johnson, aka ‘Stormskater’, gives insight into the roller skating community and a fundamental need for space, and to Japan, where the former players of the Japanese volleyball team reflect on their countless victories leading to the 1964 Olympic triumph in The Witches of The Orient, a story told through a dynamic mix of archive and anime. Finally, the relationship between artist and muse, the drawer and the drawn is discussed between two lovers in Drawings of my BF, while cartoons come to life on screen in a celebration of queer comics and graphic novels – and the artists and activists who penned them, including Alison Bechdel – in No Straight Lines.

From across the globe, a range of creative talent – both in front of and behind the camera – express their truth, each film offering encounters and inspiration to a different beat.

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— Melanie Iredale and Agnès Wildenstein

Alone Together & Shelly Belly inna Real Life

Shelly Belly inna Real Life Director(s): Cecilia Bengolea Producer(s): Dayanis D&V Argentina, France / 2021 / 24’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Dayanis D&V

Narrated through movement and music, the energy and expression of the dancehall scene of Kingston and Bog Walk in Jamaica is captured in all its vibrancy in Shelly Belly inna Real Life. Exploring the influences of culture and nature within and upon the Caribbean island art community, the film follows the language of dancehall from the intricate rhythms of the jungle landscapes to the choreography of the people whose passion-practice it follows. Shot by artist and choreographer Cecilia Bengolea over four years, this insider’s view grants unprecedented access to the characters whose vitality and influence have shaped a view of movement and life that reaches out from its Jamaican founders to the world beyond. Featuring Major Mission, Erika Miyauchi, Kissy McKoy, Craig, Nick, Jay, Shaky and Prince Blackeagle, Cecilia Bengolea, Shelly Belly, Overload Skankaz Oshane, Overload Skankaz Teroy, Giddy Elite Team, Alii and Lee Twinstarzz, Shanky, Winkyy and Larry Equanoxx.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

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Alone Together Director(s): Bradley & Pablo Producer(s): Ross Levine, Emmie Lichtenberg, Brian Ferenchik USA / 2020 / 80’ / International Premiere / English

Sales: Ross Levine

Using a DIY spirit, selfies of live Instagram posts, and a punk-like aesthetic, international pop star Charli XCX turns to her loyal fans, known as Charli’s Angels, to record a semi-collaborative album with them in 40 days during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown. For a self-confessed workaholic whose identity and wellbeing is grounded in her artwork, the stillness of the lockdown period poses a large existential question: who am I when I’m not working? As well as showing the artist’s own working processes, Alone Together takes a deep dive into the personal stories of Charli XCX’s decidedly global, predominantly LGBTQI+ fanbase, many of whom are navigating precarious situations, including unemployment, isolation and anxiety. This film shows the power music has to connect people and how transparency in the creative process can offer a cathartic form of escapism for many, especially during times of global crisis.

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Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra Director(s): Nel Minchin, Wayne Blair Producer(s): Ivan O’Mahoney Australia / 2020 / 95’ / European Premiere / English

Sales: ABC Commercial

Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra marks the Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 30th anniversary. Taking us through the company’s foundation and spectacular growth, the film recognises Bangarra’s founders and tells the story of how three young Aboriginal brothers – Stephen, David and Russell Page – transformed the dance group into a First Nations cultural powerhouse. But as the film reveals, the company’s international success came at a huge personal cost. As it enters its fourth decade, Stephen must lead the company alone, finding a way to channel grief and sorrow into the strength needed to forge ahead, with a new generation of Indigenous dancers relying on him to tell their stories. Through the eyes of the brothers and company alumni, Firestarter explores the loss and reclamation of culture, the burden of intergenerational trauma, and – crucially – the power of art as a messenger for social change, care, pleasure and healing.

Indes galantes / Gallant Indies Director(s): Philippe Béziat Producer(s): Philippe Martin , David Thion France / 2020 / 108’ / UK Premiere / English, French

Sales: Pyramide International

Gallant Indies began when young filmmaker Clément Cogitore agreed to stage Jean-Philippe Rameau’s baroque masterpiece Les Indes galantes at Opéra national de Paris, working with acclaimed choreographer Bintou Dembélé. By combining urban dance such as hip-hop, krump, break, and voguing with classical music, they look to challenge the cultural expectations of this venerable, four-century-old institution.

In Philippe Béziat’s adventurous film, various contemporary political realities come into collision – whether in rehearsals or public performances – which, combined with the animated song and dance, produce a tremendous sense of emotional energy. Cultural barriers and societal norms are shown to fall apart, all through the power of art. Philippe Béziat’s film asks a pertinent, unspoken question: could a new generation of artists storm the Bastille today?

Nominated for: the Youth Jury Award

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Je m’appelle humain / Call Me Human Director(s): Kim O’Bomsawin Producer(s): Andrée-Anne Frenette Canada / 2020 / 78’ / UK Premiere / French, Innu-Aimun

Sales: Terre Innue

This tender portrait of Innu poet, writer, filmmaker, and storyteller Joséphine Bacon follows her from the snowy streets of Montreal to the region along the coastal mouth of the Saint-Laurent river, occasionally accompanied by Ilnu-Québécoise poet Marie-Andrée Gill. Bacon talks of her efforts to salvage and preserve her elders’ ways of thinking and traditions, which the forces of Canadian colonisation have attempted to stamp out. Bacon is focused on preserving their stories for the next generation. Accompanying her through media appearances, readings, and revisiting the places of her childhood, Call Me Human takes the viewer on a heartening journey alongside a woman and her life’s work – through which she pieces together the fragments of herself that were stolen from her, and her fight to revive and preserve her culture.

King Rocker

Director(s): Michael Cumming Producer(s): James Nicholls UK / 2021 / 90’ / Festival Premiere / English

Comedian Stewart Lee, and director Michael Cumming (Brass Eye), investigate a missing piece of punk history.

Robert Lloyd, best known for fronting cult Birmingham bands The Prefects and The Nightingales, has survived under the radar for over four decades. But how, if at all, does Robert want to be remembered?

The anti-rockumentary King Rocker weaves the story of Birmingham’s undervalued, underdog autodidact with that of the city’s forgotten public sculpture of King Kong, eschewing the celebrity interview and archive-raid approach for a free-associating bricolage of Indian food, bewildered chefs, vegetable gardening, prescription medicines, pop stardom and pop art.

Sales: Krocker Film Ltd 102

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Les Sorcières de l’Orient / The Witches of the Orient Director(s): Julien Faraut Producer(s): William Jehannin of UFO Production, ISEPFrance / 2021 / 100’ / UK Premiere / French, Japanese, Russian

Sales: Lightdox

Known as the ‘Witches of the Orient’ because of their seemingly supernatural powers on the court, the former players of the Japanese women’s volleyball team, all now in their 70s, reunite to eat, talk, and share their memories. Telling a remarkable story, The Witches of the Orient spans from the squad’s beginnings – founded in the late 1950s as a worker’s team at a textile factory – to their triumph at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, which followed a record 258 successive wins that remains unbeaten to this day. Their popularity resulted in the creation of manga characters, cartoons, and anime series – all based on the team. The second feature from filmmaker Julien Faraut reworks many of these sources, splicing them together alongside some standout sequences in which extreme training routines and tense matches are energised by rhythmic editing, and a lively soundtrack from French musicians K-Raw.

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Lift Like a Girl & Stormskater

Stormskater

Director(s): Guen Murroni Producer(s): Guen Murroni, Verity Wislocki UK / 2021 / 6’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Canoe Films

Ishariah Johnson – known as ‘Stormskater’ – started skating eleven years ago, picking up tips, tricks, and techniques from other skaters in different spots across the city. Whether in parks or car parks, people flock together to learn with each other and create a community. Now one of the most well-respected skaters in the UK, roller skating is for Johnson a way to earn a living but also to take up space and to create a sense of belonging. Observing Johnson skate, Stormskater gives us an insight into the sport and its community, showing its relevance through issues of appropriation, ownership, authenticity, as well as the fundamental need for shared public space. Johnson’s dream is to open her own skate school to nurture the next generation. The roller-skating community welcomes all from day one, and this film welcomes it back with this love letter.

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/ Lift Like a Girl Director(s): Mayye Zayed Producer(s): Mayye Zayed, Anna Bolster, Anke Peteresen Denmark, Egypt, Germany / 2020 / 92’ / UK Premiere / Arabic

Sales: Cleo Media

On a noisy street corner in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a seemingly vacant corner-lot cordoned-off by chain link fencing is the training site for Egypt’s elite champions: female weightlifters. Zebiba has been training here since she was 9-years-old, following in the footsteps of some of the country’s most famous athletes of all time – such as Egypt’s first female, two-time Olympic medalist Abeer Abdel Rahman, and world champion Olympic athlete Nahla Ramadan. Nahla’s coach, the visionary Captain Ramadan, has a prestigious training record, with four Olympic, nine World and 17 Pan African champions having emerged from his makeshift gym during the two decades in which it has been operating.

Now that it is Zebiba’s turn to make her mark, can she put aside her youthful instincts and direct her focus to be the weightlifting champion that Captain Ramadan feels certain she is capable of becoming?

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Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over

Director(s): Beth B USA / 2019 / 78’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: B Productions

Beth B’s film is the first in-depth documentary exploring the life and work of radical artist and counter culture icon Lydia Lunch. Running away from a traumatic childhood, 16 year-old Lydia heads to New York. There, between working the streets and stealing food, she becomes an integral part of the city’s underground scene, fronting no wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and collaborating with the likes of Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, and Hulbert Selby Jr. A protean artist, Lunch uses spoken word, noise music, pornography, and performance with the same raw intensity to explore sex, desire, and the complex, sometimes violent dynamics of pleasure at play. Rare archive material and interviews, combined with Lydia’s brutal honesty and charisma in front of the camera, make for a compelling, deeply relevant exploration of one of the most confrontational and uncompromising artists of our time.

Maisie Director(s): Lee Cooper Producer(s): Deborah Aston, Lee Cooper UK / 2021 / 76’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Deborah Aston

After fifty long years in the business, David Raven is still shaking his sequins as ‘Maisie Trollette’, Britain’s oldest drag artist. David’s 85th is fast approaching and a special birthday performance has been arranged for him in Brighton, the UK’s capital of camp. Walter Cole, who, at age 87, holds the record for the oldest performing drag queen in the world, is flying from Portland to meet David for the first time. But professional rivalries soon flare between Britain’s feisty Pantomime Dame and America’s regal Pageant Queen, and as the big day grows nearer, David must deal with the unique challenges that performing in your eighties can bring, including battling with Alzheimer’s. Featuring Broadway classics such as ‘Lady is a Tramp’, and ‘If I Never Sing Another Song’, Maisie is a heart-warming, and often heart-breaking peek into the world of a character more colourful than his gowns.

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Men Who Sing Director(s): Dylan Williams Producer(s): Euros Wyn, Llion Tegai, Dylan Williams UK / 2021 / 90’ / World Premiere / English, Welsh

Sales: Dylan Williams

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This humorous and melancholic portrait of a male voice choir in North East Wales begins with the filmmaker’s father, Ed, a 90-year-old widower, selling the family home and making early arrangements for his own funeral. Weekly practice is his last remaining solace, but with an average age of 74, his beloved choir is facing a crisis of its own. They must act fast or face extinction, and the hunt begins to find “brown haired men” in their 40s and 50s to keep the choir going. As their search intensifies, the group grows closer. Ed finds new meaning in his life, while Merf deals with his own bad news by focusing on the choir’s revival, and Gwyn laughs in the face of a prostate cancer diagnosis, walking the wing of a plane to raise money for charity. Eventually, they travel to Northern Ireland to perform for the first time in two decades.

Rhyme & Rhythm

No Straight Lines & Drawings of my BF

Drawings of my BF

Director(s): James Cooper Producer(s): James Cooper UK / 2021 / 7’ / World Premiere / English

Artist Wilfrid Wood met his muse, Theo Adamson, on a gay hook-up app. Over the course of their sessions, what began as an artist-model relationship developed into something more. Now officially BFs (boyfriends), Wilfrid continues to draw Theo regularly and has somewhat effortlessly amassed hundreds of drawings that were brought together for an exhibition appropriately titled ‘Drawings of my BF’. As Wilfred studies Theo, and Theo returns his gaze, the two lovers discuss the romantic ideals and human realities of the sketcher-subject dynamic and the role that creating art together has played in their lasting connection.

Sales: James Cooper 108

Sheffield DocFest 2021

No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics Director(s): Vivian Kleiman Producer(s): Vivian Kleiman, Justin Hall USA / 2021 / 73’ / International Premiere / English

Sales: The Film Collaborative

“Lesbians and Gay Men Put It On Paper!” read the tagline of Gay Comix, first published in 1980. The story of the queer comic begins in a period of censorship in the USA, and marginalization even among underground cartoonists. From Come Out Comix, which made history as the first lesbian comic in 1973, to Fun Home, via Dykes to Watch Out For and Brown Bomber & The Diva, zines come to life on screen through this celebration of LGBTQI+ cartoons and graphic novels. No Straight Lines profiles five pioneers of this fascinating art scene – Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Jennifer Camper, Rupert Kinnard, and Mary Wings – producing commentary on everything from the AIDS crisis and workplace discrimination to the search for love and a good haircut. By following the artists’ personal journeys, No Straight Lines shows how they tackled issues of identity with pen and paper, winning worldwide recognition for their work.

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Raymonde el Bidaoia Director(s): Yaël Abecassis Producer(s): Hillel Roseman, Yaël Abecassis Israel / 2020 / 77’ / European Premiere / French, Hebrew, Moroccan

Sales: Panorama Films LLC

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Raymonde: diva, queen, enigma, inspiration, survivor, widow, woman, and mother. Armed with a camera, Yaël Abecassis – a famous actress who has worked with Amos Gitai, among other renowned filmmakers – follows her mother, the legendary singer Raymonde El Bidaoia, and steps into a world where she had always been a stranger.

“You know, daughter, Morocco is a kind of therapy”, Raymonde says, before they embark on a journey. The film moves from Abecassis’s childhood, which was spent between the Mellahs of Casablanca and the dunes of Ashdod, before travelling back to Morocco, the place where her mother found her fame. As they travel together, Yaël discovers a woman who articulates her weaknesses and the complexities of her choices with a keen sense of self-awareness. This film shows a mother and daughter as bound by pain, guilt, admiration, and above all else, their limitless love for music and each other.

абаре / Roses. Film-Cabaret Director(s): Irena Stetsenko Producer(s): Oleksandra Kravchenko, Oleg Sosnov Ukraine / 2021 / 78’ / International Premiere / English, Russian, Ukrainian

Sales: First Hand Films

From the Ukrainian uprising came the Dakh Daughters, a punk cabaret performance act comprising seven artists, who play 15 instruments between them. The film follows preparations for their first stage show, Roses, a multilingual and multi-instrumental tragicomic musical theatre production, through which the group explore their roles as artists, as women, and as citizens living through times of revolution and war. Shot over five years by the band’s sound producer Irena Stetsenko, we follow the Dakh Daughters on stage, in the dressing room, and on the streets of Kyiv, singing songs of protest at the Maidan square revolt. There we see the band dubbed the “sirens of revolution” – a phrase which shadows their wider artistic range, and which they later adopt with a sense of irony. Roses offers a cinematic cabaret quite unlike any other, while also giving insight into the lives of the women for whom creativity is a means of self-defense.

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Sonia & Chantal

SON CHANT

Director(s): Vivian Ostrovsky Producer(s): On the fly USA / 2020 / 13’ / UK Premiere / French

Reviewing mini DV tapes shot over a decade, filmmaker Vivian Ostrovsky rediscovered a forgotten night sequence showing Chantal Akerman and Sonia Wieder-Atherton leaving a brasserie that they had all dined at in Montparnasse, Paris. After lingering on the excerpt, Ostrovsky decided to focus on the role of music in Akerman’s films and the artist’s close collaboration with Sonia Wieder-Atherton, the cellist with whom she made more than 20 films.

Intertwining her own images from New York, Paris and Moscow with material filmed by Akerman, Ostrovsky looks for commonalities between herself and these two women.

Sales: On the fly 111

Rhyme & Rhythm

Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton Director(s): Chantal Akerman Producer(s): Rue des Roches, Noires Production France / 2003 / 51’ / French

Since the 1980s, famed cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton has been present in much of Chantal Akerman’s work, whether through her numerous collaborations soundtracks, or as a protagonist (as in Rue Mallet-Stevens, 1986), or in this case, as the subject of an extended documentary portrait. The film begins with a voiceover from Akerman, describing and situating her subject, after which Wieder-Atherton takes over the narrative, sitting before the camera for an extended presentation of her life and art. Wieder-Atherton then performs some short pieces by Claudio Monteverdi, Luciano Berio, Leos Janacek, Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert, either solo or accompanied by a small ensemble. As well as insights into an artist, this film offers a precious cinematic moment of listening.

Sales: The Party Film Sales

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Sheffield DocFest 2021

Soy Cubana & BLONDIE: VIVIR EN LA HABANA

BLONDIE: VIVIR EN LA HABANA Director(s): Rob Roth Producer(s): Tommy Manzi, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, Clem Burke, Rob Roth USA / 2020 / 18’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Tommy Manzi

2019, a 40-year-long dream comes true for Blondie when the band is invited to tour Havana, Cuba. For songwriter and guitarist Chris Stein, growing up in New York, Latin music was always “part of the background of life.” For the legendary post-punk group, this trip gives them the chance to collaborate with incredible Cuban musicians, creating some magical musical moments born out of their cross-continental collaborations. Artist Rob Roth combines Super 8 and 16mm footage of the streets of Havana with performance footage in the city filmed digitally. With narration from Blondie founders Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and Clem Burke, providing a glimpse into the passion and beauty they discovered in Havana, they speak of performance as a means of bridging political and cultural divides. As Harry says: “music is its own language.”

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Soy Cubana Director(s): Jeremy Ungar, Ivaylo Getov Producer(s): Robin Miller Ungar Cuba, USA / 2021 / 80’ / International Premiere / English, Spanish

The Vocal Vidas are an all-female a cappella group from the cradle of Afro-Cuban music, Santiago de Cuba, their infectious spirit and four-part harmonies draw from a melting pot of multicultural references, embodying the sounds of Cuba. In 2017, the ensemble were invited to perform in the United States for the first time, just as diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba began to falter. As they travelled to Los Angeles, playing in restaurants and jazz clubs while preparing for their biggest concert ever – in front of 4,000 Angelenos at Downtown LA’s Grand Performances – the journey of the Vocal Vidas came to resemble the story of two geographically close yet ideologically disparate cultures, hoping to reconnect in the face of international uncertainty.

Sales: Paradigm Agency

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Ghosts & Apparitions Cinema was borne out of the tension between that which is visible, and that which – however lived, however felt – struggles to find material form or expression.

This realm of virtuality – the “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract” – carries the possibilities of both oppression and freedom, resistance and violence, fear and revolution. Ghosts & Apparitions is the exploration of this wonderful, interstitial space, and of the capacities of film to expand our notions and experiences of reality. Past and present images gather on the screen, and build a possible map of our times: one which is complex, multifaceted, and which can’t be grasped or parsed through fixed codes. With films ranging from 1945 to 2021, from 23 countries, this is a journey full of surprises, that encourages us to reflect on the richness and complexity of our multiple existences.

In ‘Memory Revisited: Focus Taiwan’, programmer Wood Lin places retrospective works from the island’s cinematic history alongside reflexive, searching films made in the current day. Liao Jiekai’s On Memory and Ishikawa Ryuichi’s Mitsugu reflect on the rituals of mourning, exploring their political, social and spiritual dimensions. Vincent Carelli’s Yaõkwá, Image and Memory, Amir Aethen Valen‘s The Whisper of the Leaves, Minjung Kim’s The Red Filter is Withdrawn, and Rodrigo Ribeiro’s The White Death of the Black Wizard also show how image-making is a kind of ritual, by focusing on the capacity of images to become living testimonies of the past.

Some films become rituals in themselves. Yudhajit Basu’s Kalsubai, Rokhaya Marieme Balde’s Seeking Aline, Russell Morton’s Saudade, and Matthias De Groof’s Under the White Mask: the film Haesaerts could have made are films made with a liberatory desire, employing magic and imagination to overcome oppression, or trying to expel the demons of colonisation from the history of cinema. Presented as a complement to her installation at Site Gallery, in Charlotte Jarvis’s In Posse, fertility rituals and patriarchal concepts around procreation and child-bearing are bluntly interrogated through a network of subversive gestures, concepts and experiments.

Liberation and subversion are also levied against traditional, conservative notions of family, home, and community: in Maxim Pechersky’s The Year of the White Moon and Jurgis Matulevičius’s Golden Flask, home is shown to be something on the cusp of irrevocably breaking. In Jay Rosenblatt’s When We

Were Bullies, Lur Olaizola Lizarralde’s Blue Sky, and Julie Nguyen Van’s Barataria, the question of belonging to a community poses a tense and existential challenge. In Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax’s Two Sons and a River of Blood and Angelo Madsen Minax’s North by Current, family in a queer context becomes both a construction and the source of struggle, challenging the ways that fixed notions of identity articulates our day-to-day existence.

The construction of identity in a deterritorialized context is also examined, be that through the lens of emmigration in Humberto González Bustillo’s Aphorisms of the Lake, through intergenerational diasporic stories in Suneil Sanzgiri’s Letter From Your Far-Off Country, or through the deconstruction of the colonial landscape in Sanaz Sohrabi’s One Image, Two Acts.

Political memory and monumentality is the link between Wood Lin’s Liberty Square, which looks at the imposing presence of the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, and Michael Pattison’s Lubiana Laibach as a cinematic mapping of the landmarks of Ljubljana’s wartime occupation. Our current world is shaped by systems of vision and control. Surveillance, body-cameras, and the management of light are powerful methods of necropolitics. Haig Aivazian’s All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes and Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere are provocative poetic reflections on this reality.

Ghosts & Apparitions is also about discovering the history of film, and its resonance with our times. In a time when gender parity in the film sector is being legitimately fought for, we present three films by women who challenged the norm and opened the path for future generations: Kay Mander, Margaret Thomson, and Sarah Erulkar, whose work is presented in ‘Reel Women / Real Lives: Britain’s Female Documentary Makers’.

This is also the space to question notions around the documentarian practices and expanding their limits.

Marc Isaacs (The Filmmaker’s House, Sheffield DocFest 2020) presents a selection of films by Danish filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen, followed by a talk on the art of staging reality, looking at how the filmmaker uses fictional processes, collaboration with non-actors, and various other methodologies to open up popular conceptions of what documentary means.

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– Rabz Lansiquot and Cíntia Gil

Bodies Under Control

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes

Director(s): Haig Aivazian Producer(s): Haig Aivazian Lebanon / 2020 / 17’ / UK Premiere / Arabic, English

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. The video moves between cities like New York and Paris, with the artist’s native Beirut setting the central pulse. Creating an associative genealogy that moves from whale oil lamps to gas lanterns to LED bulbs, from blackouts to curfews, the video is comprised of found footage and material from the artist’s own phone. Layering, splicing, and confronting disparate kinds of sound and image, Aivazian generates a sensorial meditation on how the fundamentals of human vision – light hitting the retina – were mechanized into tools that capture our movements, be it in everyday life or on screen.

Sales: Haig Aivazian 117

Ghosts & Apparitions

All Light, Everywhere Director(s): Theo Anthony Producer(s): Riel Roch-Decter, Jonna McKone, Sebastian Pardo USA / 2021 / 109’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: Autlook Filmsales

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Focusing primarily on the use of police body cameras, All Light, Everywhere is a propulsive, kaleidoscopic essay film that explores the shared histories of cameras, weapons, policing and justice. In a visually distinctive survey that traverses a long historical timeline, Theo Anthony connects contemporary usages of camera technologies within law enforcement and militaristic contexts with their historic precedents, proposing the idea that any camera can be a weapon, and often is. Drawing fascinating, frequently surprising connections between disparate subjects and ideas, All Light, Everywhere is grounded in Baltimore, depicting the communities most significantly affected by the more insidious applications of these technologies, while also exploring the filmmaker’s own relation to a technological weapon he himself wields: his camera. As surveillance technologies become a fixture of everyday life, Anthony interrogates the complexity of an ‘objective’ point of view, probing the biases inherent in both human perception and the lens.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Emily Chao & Al Wong: Films in Dialogue

Bruce Takes Dragon Town Director(s): Emily Chao USA, Taiwan / 2015 / 15’ / UK Premiere

Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town is a meditation on displacement, historical disembodiment and the power of cinema to immortalise lost souls. The whirr of a film projector at a lonely outdoor screening, the rhythm of bustling nighttime crowds and scenes of dilapidated futurist architecture meld with clips from a film directed decades earlier by the filmmaker’s uncle in Taiwan. Shot digitally, this early work predates Chao’s process-based celluloid work, but it shares an interest in materiality through the footage of the outdoor 35mm film screening and incorporation of the 16mm-to-DVD transfer of her uncle’s film. The film’s first person commentary (delivered through on-screen text) creates a disjunction with its static cinematography, resulting in a perspective that feels both interior and disembodied.

This unique viewpoint becomes an appropriate positioning for the film. Bruce Takes Dragon Town feels restless and free-floating, just like the lost souls (both ghostly and corporeal) it takes as its subject.

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Twin Peaks Director(s): Al Wong USA / 1977 / 50’ / International Premiere

Print courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

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While working as a delivery driver, artist Al Wong became captivated by the meditative qualities of the looping roads around San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. These roads create a hypnotic figure-8 pattern which is traversed during morning, night, summer or winter, in rain and sunshine throughout the course of a year. But rather than a simple documentation of these journeys, this long-form structural film utilises Wong’s conceptual explorations to create a stunning, sensual work of pure cinema that continually upends our perceptual expectations. On the soundtrack, we hear the continual lapping of ocean waves, signifying the infinity of the natural world. A student of the legendary Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Al Wong here creates a film which perfectly symbolises the endless cycles discussed in Zen Buddhist philosophy. A monumental, largely-unseen masterwork 1970s avant-garde film, Twin Peaks has been restored in 16mm by the Pacific Film Archive and will be screened outside of the United States for the first time at Sheffield DocFest.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Hard to be a Human

Two Sons and a River of Blood

Director(s): Amber Bemak, Angelo Madsen Minax Producer(s): Amber Bemak, Angelo Madsen Minax USA / 2021 / 10’ / UK Premiere / English, Spanish

In a self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man, one of the women is pregnant. Together, they enact a public sex ritual to celebrate an ideal or hoped-for interpersonal multiplicity. Throughout the ritual, they acknowledge their cyborg bodies as technological interventions, and imagine a kind of erotic magic that could allow for procreation based solely on desire. When the child is miscarried, the three begin to build their own mythic understanding of where bodies live when they are not inside us. They create a story which traces the movement of the ‘non-body’ – from a hole, to a river, to a room. As a parallel emerges between the pregnant body and the trans body, their sex-act becomes the key to access the world of non-bodied existence.

Sales: Vtape 121

Ghosts & Apparitions

North by Current Director(s): Angelo Madsen Minax Producer(s): Angelo Madsen Minax USA / 2021 / 86’ / UK Premiere / English

Sales: HARD FLOW

After the inconclusive death of his young niece and the incarceration of his brother-in-law, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown, preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervour, and trans embodiment. Lyrically-assembled images built from decades of home movies combine with ethereal narration, to form an idiosyncratic and poetic undertow, which guides the viewer through different lives and relationships. As Michigan’s seasons relentlessly shift, so does the meaning of family, as Madsen, his sister and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other. Purposefully inviting internal searching, rather than providing clear statements or easy answers, North By Current dives head-first into the challenges of creating identity, the agony of growing up, and the ever-fickle nuances of family.

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Home

God Beloi Luni / The Year of The White Moon Director(s): Maxim Pechersky Producer(s): Maxim Pechersky Russia / 2020 / 21’ / International Premiere / Russian

Sales: VOSTOK

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The Year of the White Moon is shot almost entirely in a deserted home, inviting the spectator into the intimacy of a living room: the camera traces over a sofa, a chandelier and cracks on the ceiling, and lingers on a small TV set. Like a film within a film, a series of tensely humorous phone conversations between a superstitious mother living in the provinces of Russia and her gay son living in the capital emenate through the TV. She lives according to astrological predictions; he complains about problems with his boyfriend. She sings karaoke; he travels the world. She is sick; he is silent. She insists that the performance of a ritual, to the ‘White Moon’, will bring him light and grace.

The Year of the White Moon is a tragicomedy about a conversation between two people who hear each other, but are not listening.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award Ghosts & Apparitions

Auksinis Flakonas / Golden Flask Director(s): Jurgis Matulevicius, Paulius Anicas Producer(s): Stasys Baltakis Lithuania / 2020 / 28’ / International Premiere / Lithuanian, Russian

Sales: Film Jam

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At night, a man walks drunkenly as though walking against the wind. He is coming back home to a small apartment he shares with three others. After so many cigarettes and just as many drinks, the bodies in this house are as worn down as the walls that decay around them. A cat observes them. They seem lost, only barely awake. These souls search for each other, often in unpleasant ways or with hurtful remarks. They talk about God, their dreams, and the beer bellies they are cultivating. “I wanted to live, not just exist”, the oldest woman says. This mysterious house could be the origin of cinema itself, or maybe it is simply the end of the world. Cinematographer Jurgis Matulevičius frames these human lives beautifully, creating a liminal space between fragility and toughness. Time seems circular; life is a waiting room.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

Sheffield DocFest 2021

How Can We Ever Live Together

When We Were Bullies

Director(s): Jay Rosenblatt Producer(s): Jay Rosenblatt, Stefano Tealdi USA / 2021 / 35’ / UK Premiere / English

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous”, Albert Einstein once said. When We Were Bullies begins with a mind boggling ‘coincidence’ which ultimately leads the filmmaker to track down his fifth grade class, and the class’ teacher, to see what they remember of a bullying incident from 50 years ago.

In a playful yet poignant way, Rosenblatt begins to understand his complicity and the bully in all of us.

Using a mix of collage, conversations with his former colleagues, the wisdom of his teacher, and his own slippery voice-over narration, Rosenblatt constructs a moving reflection on our own capacity to be destructive. When We Were Bullies is a humorous and gentle meditation on the banality of evil.

Sales: Submarine 125

Ghosts & Apparitions

Zerua blu / Blue sky Director(s): Lur Olaizola Lizarralde Producer(s): Lur Olaizola Lizarralde Spain / 2020 / 14’ / International Premiere / Basque, English, French

Sales: Lur Olaizola Lizarralde

On January 24th 1954 Mamaddi Jaunarena took a boat from Le Havre to New York. She was 22, and the only thing she knew about her trip was where she would be meeting the mistress whom she would serve as a maid. The trip took seven days and seven nights. This could be the beginning of a story, and has come to inform the stories that Mamaddi still carries on her hands, and in her eyes, and her words – but, in a way, Mamaddi’s journey began before she stepped on the boat. In a film theater in her hometown, Ortzaize, in the French Basque Province, Mamaddi started journeying through the cinema, absorbing images that affected her life, and remained in her consciousness forever: a beautiful Cadillac car, a young woman, the bluest sky. This is the imagery of emmigration – and reality is often cruder than that which is imagined.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

Barataria Director(s): Julie Nguyen Van Qui Producer(s): Jean-Marie Gigon and Louise Hentgen (SaNoSi Productions / Vertical Production) France, Spain / 2021 / 49’ / World Premiere / Spanish

Sales: SaNoSi Productions

In El Quiñon, a newly-built but half-finished city in Spain, the ochre facades are juxtaposed to the fields of La Mancha. Residents talk about their hopes and dreams, illustrating through these revelations different ways of living in a city that was hard-hit by the financial crisis – and its continuing fallout – of 2008. A sense of community emerges, despite this seeming impossible in the circumstances. The first generation of children that grew up in this town are now teenagers, and El Quiñon – once written-off as a modern ghost town – starts to write its own story, one that has a flourishing social harmony. Filmed during the national elections, Barataria offers an intimate and complex vision of contemporary Spain, a decade after the financial crisis. The aspirations, fantasies and livelihoods of the inhabitants, paired with the connections they have fostered with one another, allows them to take control of their uncertain futures.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

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In Posse Director(s): Charlotte Jarvis Producer(s): Charlotte Jarvis UK / 2021 / 46’ / English

Sales: Charlotte Jarvis

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With In Posse, Charlotte Jarvis documents a quest she took to make semen from ‘female’ cells. The work engages with semen as a revered magical substance, a totem of literal and symbolic potency, and aims to use art and science to disrupt the patriarchy. This has involved growing spermatozoa from her own body, developing a female form of seminal plasma, and resurrecting, reimagining and reenacting the ancient Greek fertility festival of Thesmophoria with new communal rites and rituals devised by participating womXn. This cinematic version of In Posse is shown alongside its installation, a new commission by Sheffield DocFest, in partnership with Site Gallery. Jarvis will join for a Q&A to discuss how the work rewrites our cultural narratives. In Posse was produced in collaboration with Dr. Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes (Leiden University Medical Center), Kapelica Gallery/Kersnikova Institute (Ljubljana), MU Hybrid Art House (Eindhoven) and NESTA.

Ghosts & Apparitions

Image and Memory

Yaõkwá, Imagem e Memória / Yaõkwá, Image and Memory Director(s): Rita Carelli, Vincent Carelli Producer(s): Vídeo nas Aldeias Brazil / 2020 / 21’ / European Premiere / Enawene Nawe

Sales: Vídeo nas Aldeias

Video in the Villages is an ongoing project initiated in 1985 by filmmakers Vincent Carelli and Virginia Valadão. It works to use television technologies in partnership with Indigenous peoples as a tool of empowerment for their fight to preserve their lands and ways of life. For 15 years, this project has worked with the Enawenê-nawê Indians, creating extensive records of the Yaõkwa, their longest ritual, which seeks to maintain the balance of the earthly world as a spiritual world. Now, in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, an audience of more than 1,000 Enawenê Indians view images depicting their Yaõkwá ritual, recorded 25 years earlier. Through footage of their deceased relatives replayed in these repatriation screenings, the Enawenê-nawê rediscover precious customs, rituals, and traditions that have fallen into disuse in the years since these images were first recorded.

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El Susurro de las Hojas / The Whisper of the Leaves Director(s): Amir Aether Valen Producer(s): Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago / 2020 / 16’ / World Premiere / Spanish

Sales: Promoción Internacional EICTV

Beneranda sits quietly, treating her knee with medicinal leaves. Meanwhile, David rubs his skin with herbal lotion. The birds sing morning songs, and Isidro begins spraying the crops in his garden. Three little goats come out of their shed, the last with Beneranda. She calls to the other goats who follow her lead.

David listens, and as the birds sing to him, he seems to understand their call. Beneranda ties her goats to a firm tree, and they feast on the abundance around them. Isidro eats a banana and lays down to rest. As his eyes close, images flicker, featuring the textures of their skin. This skin becomes trees, then branches, and gradually, more sounds of life join in the symphony. The Whisper of the Leaves is a careful and tender meditation on the interconnectivity between the human spirit and other forms of life.

“레드필터가 철회됩니다” / “The red filter is withdrawn.”

Director(s): Minjung Kim Producer(s): Kyungsuk Shin South Korea / 2020 / 12’ / UK Premiere / No Dialogue Memories of uprisings and massacres are found in every corner of Jeju, a self-governing volcanic island province in South Korea. The aesthetics of “the red filter is withdrawn.” are based on René Magritte’s La condition humaine (1935), one of his many ‘window paintings’, which offers a view of the outside of a cave superimposed on a canvas. The silent narration of Minjung King’s film also includes quotes from the script of Hollis Frampton’s performance, A Lecture (1968). Turning the caves and bunkers of Jeju Island into camera lenses and projection screens, the film connects the past and present of a place that holds memories of colonialism, and questions the meaning of image-capturing itself.

Sales: Minjung Kim

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A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro / The White Death of The Black Wizard Director(s): Rodrigo Ribeiro Producer(s): Luiz Gustavo Laurindo, Julia Faraco, Rodrigo Ribeiro Brazil / 2020 / 10’ / UK Premiere / No Dialogue

Sales: Gata Maior Filmes

Through a suicide note written by enslaved Afro-Brazilian, Timóteo, memories of Brazil’s history of slavery are revealed, that overflow into imagery showing ethereal landscapes, accompanied by a soundtrack of harrowing noise. Punctuated by reinvented and manipulated ghostly archival imagery and an undulating, wailing score, this poetic essay film is an intimate and sensorial journey reflecting on the silencing and invisibility of Black people across the diaspora. Images, sounds, and memories reverberate across generations, exploring the intangible psychosocial effects of slavery, its material and architectural impact, and the extreme measures that were taken to resist it. With Brazil holding the record for the importation of the most enslaved Africans during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, this film is a pensive meditation on the frequently underrecognised violent legacies that still haunt Brazil and the world today.

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Memory Revisited: Focus Taiwan In the historic context of Taiwan, ‘Memory Revisited’ also means ‘History Revisited’. This program emphasises personal and artistic perspectives that use archive footage to challenge the ideologies that were instilled into Taiwan’s citizens in the past – as well as

this, these films also show how diverse Taiwan society and Taiwan cinema is!

— Wood LIN, Curator

/ A Short History of Decay

Director(s): LIN Shih-chieh Taiwan / 2014 / 6’ / No Dialogue

History is the interpretation of linear signs and symbols. By decontextualizing the signs, the images are liberated. To fight against this illusion, let there be glitches. This video is sampled from Assignment Taiwan, a propaganda film made by the US army in the 70s, introducing the colonized history and the establishment of the US military in Taiwan after the Second World War.

Sales: Shih-chieh LIN 131

Ghosts & Apparitions

/ Resampling the Past

Director(s): Marco WILMS Taiwan / 2010 / 16’ / No Dialogue

In Resampling the Past, the filmmaker uses a modern perspective to re-edit archival footage showing Taiwan between 1945 and 1985. Creating a contemporary musical out of historical images, this film reflects the filmmaker’s understanding of Taiwan’s history.

Sales: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute

/ One World One Dream Director(s): CHUNG Chuan Producer(s): Public Television Service Foundation (PTS) Taiwan / 2018 / 20’ / International Premiere / Mandarin

People say that what happens in dreams is the opposite of that which unfolds in reality. But sometimes, reality itself is like a dream, and also a mirror image.

Although reality can present a reflection of our dreaming lives, it cannot reverse time. In dreams, however, like an island where time and space are stagnating, a new moment may seem familiar again.

Sales: Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute 132

Sheffield DocFest 2021

回程列車 / Return Director(s): HUANG Pang-chuan Producer(s): Natalia TREBIK France / 2018 / 20’ / French

This film intertwines two journeys in two different time periods. In the first one, a traveler on their way home picks up tattered memories of the green years along the transcontinental railway from Europe to Asia. In the other, wartime memories flash back once again through an old family photo. Amid the steady rhythm of the swaying train, the past and the present merge, revealing a forgotten memory, which has been covered with dust for a long time.

Sales: Le Fresnoy

斷線風箏 / The Falling Kite

Director(s): HSIAO Mei-ling Taiwan / 1999 / 42’ / French, Mandarin, Taiwanese

The filmmaker lives in a dark and cold stone-paved town, far from her homeland in Taiwan. Leafing through photographs, her grandmother unravels a memory.

Meanwhile, the French-speaking son of a Chinese man, who had arrived in France as a coal mine worker one century ago, speaks about his life. This film captures the emotions of wanderers caught between nations and history.

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此岸：一個家族故事 / This Shore: A Family Story Director(s): Tzu-An WU Producer(s): Tzu-An WU Taiwan, USA / 2020 / 62’ / International Premiere / Chinese, English

When the filmmaker told his aunt that he found his grandmother’s painting in a Chinese restaurant in America, his aunt burst into tears. Wandering through Cold War constructions, Taiwan-US relations, generations of diaspora, family romances, and ghost stories, this film transforms personal and collective familial memories into a reworking of The Flying Dutchman, wherein they are doomed to sail the oceans forevermore.

Sales: Eric Chou

童年往事 / The Time to Live and the Time to Die

Director(s): Hsiao-Hsien HOU Producer(s): Chui Gwok-Leung Taiwan / 1985 / 118’ / Chinese

Sales: Company Central Motion Picture Corp.

Spanning from 1947 to 1965, this personal film displays the complexity of identity and the shifting moods of displaced people, adopting a young boy’s perspective as he comes of age. He and his family (parents, grandmother, older sister, three brothers) encounter the shock of leaving their homeland; only the boy is able to acclimatise himself to the new country. After experiencing a family member’s death, the boy is forced to grow up and face the reality of real life.

Loaded with deep sentiment for the homeland and weighted with the fragile feelings of childhood years, The Time to Live and the Time to Die is regarded as a masterpiece of Taiwan New Cinema in the 1980s, but its form, narration, and aesthetic are all similar to the form of the personal documentary; sentimental and touching, this film encourages viewers to revisit their memories and preserve their own personal history.

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Reel Women / Real Lives: Britain’s Female Documentary Filmmakers A special DocFest preview of a major BFI project, coming in Spring 2022, celebrating pioneering British women documentary filmmakers. Three digitally restored films provide a taster: Homes for the People (1945, Kay Mander); The Troubled Mind (1954, Margaret Thomson); Something Nice to Eat (1967, Sarah Erulkar).

— Restored by the BFI National Archive and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation.

Homes for the People Kay Mander / BFI / UK / 1945 / 23’

Something Nice to Eat Sarah Erulka / BFI / UK / 1967 / 21’

One of Mander’s most powerful and radical films, it gives space for working class women to describe their living conditions in London, Derby, Rhondda and Northamptonshire.

“Cooking is a kind of loving.” Featuring Jean Shrimpton, and sponsored by the Gas Council, this film encapsulates the spirit of the 1960s in a gloriously entertaining, sometimes patronising and always visually inventive tribute to good food – preferably prepared using a gas cooker.

The Troubled Mind Margaret Thomson / BFI / UK / 1954 / 20’

Sales: BFI

A dramatised documentary featuring Adrienne Corri, made to recruit women for training as nurses in ‘mental hospitals.’ It takes a deeply humane and stylistically vivid approach. Some of the treatments shown would be considered unsuitable today.

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Remains of History

Liberty Square Director(s): Wood LIN Producer(s): Wood LIN Taiwan / 2020 / 12’ / International Premiere / Mandarin

Sales: Wood LIN

In the memorial park for the great leader lies a square named ‘Liberty’. Built when Taiwan was under one-party rule, the square was initially named the ‘Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Square’ after the President of the Republic of China, who relocated to Taiwan after the overthrow of the Kuomintang regime in China during the Chinese Civil War, before it was renamed ‘Liberty Square’ in 2007. By gazing upon this place, filmmaker Wood LIN looks to uncover the legacy of authoritarianism that this dictator has left on contemporary Taiwan.

Are those that play in this square aware that they do so under the statue of a dictator? Do the tourists that travel here know who they are paying their respects to? Interweaving audio from propaganda films with footage of the square, Liberty Square raises questions about the nature of history and democracy, neither of which are as simple as they may first seem.

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Lubiana Laibach Director(s): Michael Pattison Producer(s): Michael Pattison UK / 2020 / 63’ / World Premiere / No Dialogue

Sales: Michael Pattison

The Path of Remembrance and Comradeship is a long walkway encircling Ljubljana, Slovenia, charting the length of a military perimeter that surrounded the city during its occupation in World War Two. Seventy large stones dot the path at intervals along the way, marking the position of former bunkers erected by the Italian and German armies to quash a burgeoning partisan resistance. Wryly mimicking the leisurely pace of a stroll, Michael Pattison’s Lubiana Laibach inches along the path one boulder at a time. The film is made up of a dazzling montage of static shots, one dissolving seamlessly into the next. The marker of each shot to the other is the fixed outline of the stones themselves, which do not change position on screen. What warps and transforms before our eyes is the space around them, a powerful evocation and metaphorical reanimation of the invisible contours of a history of resistance.

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Return Journeys

/ On Memory

Director(s): Liao Jiekai Producer(s): Jeremy Chua Singapore / 2021 / 34’ / World Premiere / Mandarin

Sales: Prism Pictures

After two decades of avoiding the Qing Ming festival tradition of grave-sweeping, Liao Jiekai visits the graves of his ancestors. Here at the cemetery, everything looks different: the Singaporean mass exhumation programme has transformed the landscape, and Liao has no coordinates anymore. Lost in that space, he finds an old man from the future: his future self. Together, they embark on a journey of retracing the places their family would visit during the festival. Along the journey, they re-enact and contemplate their ancestral roots and redeem the ravages of time. Stones – an anthology of poems by te Singaporean writer Yeng Pway Ngon – inspires and haunts this film, building a multi-layered meditation on the passage of time. Death and the transference of spirits appear within a film that confronts both tradition and modernity.

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MITSUGU Director(s): Ryuichi Ishikawa Producer(s): Ryuichi Ishikawa Japan / 2017 / 42’ / International Premiere / Japanese

Sales: Que Lindo

“I love your photos and I’d love you to take my portraits.”

This is the message that photographer Ryuichi Ishikawa received from a man named Mitsugu. Attached was a photo of Mitsugu, a man with a distinctive appearance and a tattooed face. When the two met, Mitsugu revealed that his mother had passed away, and that he wanted to prepare her ashes and then throw them into the sea near her hometown. He wanted Ishikawa to photograph this; Ishikawa decided instead to film Mitsugu in his studio. Mitsugu carefully performs a mourning ritual with her remains, and each gesture feels like one of farewell.

Ishikawa gently films every detail, highlighting the tiniest minutia, and after a while, Ishikawa becomes fond of Mitsugu’s gentle soul. Here, a bond formed between one man’s body and gestures, another man’s camera, and the sense of solemnity emanating through the room during such a profound moment in their shared experience.

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Some Magic to Fight Oppression

Onder Het Witte Masker: De Film Die Haesaerts Had Kunnen Maken / Under the White Mask: The Film Haesaerts Could Have Made Director(s): Matthias De Groof Producer(s): Daniel De Valck Belgium / 2020 / 9’ / International Premiere / Lingala Under the White Mask: the film Haesaerts could have made uses fragments of Under the Black Mask, a 1958 film about Congolese art directed by the Belgian artist Paul Haesaerts, which has been qualified as colonial propaganda. This new film imagines what the masks – now subjects, and not objects – would say. Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is spoken in Lingala for the first time. This speech is still a critical mirror for Europe. Under The White Mask is limited to the elements already existing in 1958.

Sales: Kino Rebelde 140

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Kalsubai Director(s): Yudhajit Basu Producer(s): Film & Television Institute of India India / 2020 / 20’ / UK Premiere / Marathi

An ethnographic film exploring the legend of Kalsubai, a Goddess of India’s Mahadeo Koli people, whose story and identity remains highly present within the consciousness of the women of the tribe today. The film tells the story of the Goddess – whose name was given to the highest mountain peak of Maharashtra – while drawing visual contrasts through the use of different types of ancient and contemporary imagery, creating an alternative sense of temporality. For filmmaker Yudhajit Basu, Kalsubai’s legend evokes the revolt of a woman against an archaic patriarchy. His film – composed of carefully crafted, often static shots presented within a rounded-square frame – plunges us into a reverie that seeks traces of this ancestral myth in the contemporary world.

Sales: Yudhajit Basu

À La Recherche d’Aline / Seeking Aline Director(s): Rokhaya Marieme Balde Producer(s): Nicolas Wadimoff Senegal, Switzerland / 2020 / 27’ / UK Premiere / Diola, French, Wolof Rokhaya Marieme Balde, a young filmmaker, returns to her home in Dakar to make a film about Aline Sitoe Diatta, a young heroine of the Senegalese struggle against the French colonial empire, and a symbol of freedom and resistance. Seeking Aline follows Balde through her research, which includes discussions with her team and interviews with local personalities who share oral histories passed down through generations.

Additionally, striking fictional re-enactments, shot on location, transcend the biographical and enter the realm of spirituality and ritual. These scenes honour Aline’s influence as a freedom fighter, and powerful religious leader, by pushing the boundaries of both the documentary form and historical record.

Sales: HEAD – Genève 141

Ghosts & Apparitions

Saudade Director(s): Russell Adam Morton Producer(s): Amanda Zhang Singapore / 2021 / 20’ / International Premiere / Creole

Sales: Russell Morton

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Saudade is an aural and visual archive narrated entirely in Kristang – a creole language that emerged in 16th century Portuguese colonial Malacca. The film reimagines rituals and choreography characteristic of early Eurasian kampongs in three acts: a song and dance of the Jinkli Nona; a scene between a shrimp fisherman and his wife; and a cross-cultural encounter with the Malay ghost Orang Minyak. Using folklore and myth as narrative anchors, Morton weaves elements of his personal identity and allegorical storytelling into the film, examining the origins of Eurasians. The intermingled Asian and European ancestry of the domiciled community is captured through the seemingly disparate appearance of a supernatural Malay legend, shown alongside characters donning costumes that draw upon the conventions of Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch forms of dress. Tapping into the exultant energies of the Eurasian imagination, the film tells of the loss and displacement of a people, and a language.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Stories of Struggle, Stories of Diaspora

Aforismos del Lago / Aphorisms of the Lake Director(s): Humberto González Bustillo Producer(s): Diego Murillo, Humberto González Bustillo Venezuela / 2021 / 26’ / World Premiere / English, French, German, Spanish

Sales: Héctor Silva Núñez

After his mother falls ill, filmmaker Humberto González Bustillo flies back home. Upon his return, he memorialises his childhood, but also recounts the colonial interest in Venezuelan land, and considers the now crisis-stricken oil industry, which has distorted everyday life in the country beyond recognition. Aphorisms of the Lake insists on finding, or reclaiming, the filmmaker’s desired version of his homeland, while accepting the impossibility of such a task. In this way, this diaristic film – shot almost entirely on Bustillo’s phone – is a meditation on grief, and a visual poem haunted by nostalgia. It is also deeply concerned with the patterns of migration: what it means to leave one’s family, and to anticipate the loss inherent in a temporary return to them. This is emphasised in a sequence where, via image-editing software, the filmmaker’s name is excised from official documents, as a narrator suggests that dreams can act as an ethereal meeting place for separated persons.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

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Letter From Your Far-Off Country Director(s): Suneil Sanzgiri Producer(s): Suneil Sanzgiri India, USA / 2020 / 18’ / UK Premiere / English, Hindi, Urdu Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002 – the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat – and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, Suneil Sanzgiri’s film traces lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, and song. He searches for solidarity in the sounds and colours of the Shaheen Bagh movement in Delhi – a women-led protest – as well as the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, the song of Iqbal Bano, the theater of Safdar Hashmi, and images of anti-caste Dalit intellectual and founder of the Indian constitution, B.R. Ambedkar. This converges with personal material: interviews between Sanzgiri and his father, and a letter addressed to his distant relative, Communist Party leader Prabhakar Sanzgiri. Mixing digital renderings of Kashmir’s mountains with 16mm film and direct animation techniques, Letter From Your Far-off Country maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression.

Sales: Suneil Sanzgiri

Yek Tasveer, Do Bardasht / One Image, Two Acts Director(s): Sanaz Sohrabi Producer(s): Sanaz Sohrabi Canada, Germany, Iran, USA / 2020 / 45’ / UK Premiere / English, Farsi

Sales: Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture

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Between 1908 - 1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – currently British Petroleum (BP) – strategically utilised ethnographic film and photography production to promote and represent its colonial operations in Iran.

Investigating the relationship between petro-modernity and photography and film as technologies of colonialism, One Image, Two Acts unpacks the spatial and cultural manifestation of this emergent image-economy, which operated in tandem with the larger petroleum industry.

With a particular focus on the historical ethnographic film and photographic surveys produced by BP, Sohrabi’s film examines the formations of early modernist spaces of leisure, particularly cinemas, in relation to the broader social engineering project in the oil towns of South-Western Iran. One Image, Two Acts also ruminates on inherited pain, confiding in – and finding solidarity with – Amir Naderi’s 1984 film, The Runner, which it quotes from as part of its wide-reaching, convincingly organised argument.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

The Art of Staging Reality: Three Films by Jon Bang Carlsen

“Documentary films that pretend to be just filming reality, without reality acknowledging the intrusion of the camera crew, are dangerous”, says Danish filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen. This programme of three of Bang Carlsen’s films will offer an insight into the working methods of a filmmaker who is never afraid to reinvent his approach in order to realise a cinematic narrative. Non-fiction and fiction are just two different methods for exploring the world, and in Bang Carlsen’s films, the two are often inseparable.

— Curated by Marc Isaacs

Before the Guests Arrive Jon Bang Carlsen / Tine Hjortbøl, Henrik Møller-Sørensen / Denmark / 1984 / 20’

How to Invent Reality Jon Bang Carlsen / Jon Bang Carlsen / Denmark / 1996 / 30’ / Danish

On the west coast of Denmark, two elderly women are preparing a small beach hotel for the oncoming season, while talking about life and death, and teasing each other. Before the Guests Arrive is a poetic perception of the relationship between Mrs. Bech and Mrs. Christensen and the well-ordered past that they have chosen as their present.

How to Invent Reality is a filmic essay about how filmmaker Jon Bang Carlsen approaches reality with a camera. After filming It’s Now or Never (1996), about an Irish bachelor’s quest to find love, in this film Carlsen explains how he manipulates reality to get to its core, utilising a method he calls “staged documentary.” In the film’s narration, Carlsen states: “I can only see the world by illuminating it with myself. Therefore, my shadow is always a big part of the finished film, and therefore my films have nothing to do with truth.

They are my perceptions of the world, nothing else.”

It’s Now or Never Jon Bang Carlsen / Jon Bang Carlsen / Denmark / 1996 / 31’ The Irish west coast’s harsh yet graceful landscape is the setting for this documentary comedy. At the centre stands Jimmy, middle-aged and lonely. Looking out of his window, the only living being he sees is a cow, which he purchased from another friend – also a bachelor. Dreaming of a woman to share his life with, Jimmy approaches a matchmaker, who quizzes him about his preferences concerning the opposite sex. Jimmy waits, fantasises, and often jokes with his neighbour Austin. He asks his God and his big dog for advice, and builds stone dykes while mumbling that for him, “it is now or never.” Then, one day, this vigorous man receives a call from his matchmaker.

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Northern Focus

Blooming from the towns and cities that, in some ways, were left to be forgotten as forlorn relics of industry, the films in Northern Focus offer stories of community and craft, nostalgia and resilience, and of our neighbours and our heroes. The landscapes – inflected by the traces and echoes of heavy industry – provide engines for activism and altruism, fueled by the subjects’ unassuming beauty and brilliance. In a Sheffield DocFest first, we are taking a spotlight to the artists and talent down the road and round the corner, in hearth and in heart.

Almost 30 years after it was first shown, Kim Flitcroft’s Tales From A Hard City continues to resonate in Sheffield. Flawed characters and familiar locations are shown with humour and fondness, making it a cultural legacy of this city. In another ode to a Northern city, The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory, Sema Basharan opens a different perspective of Bradford, layering evocative archives and testimonies of peace and community from activists of different faiths and heritages. In Jun and Growing Love, it’s the small wonders of creation and manual labor that are celebrated. A seed grows into a strange flower at the hand of an attentive filmmaker. A ceramic bowl slowly takes shape on the pottery wheel of Jun Rhee. It will be used for breakfast cereal, everyday, until it cracks, and breaks. Video Villanelle (for distance) allows glimpses of life, seen through the lens of a phone, to be woven and repeated, forming a mosaic of seemingly trivial moments; a travelogue of the everyday.

Dunstan Bruce, founding member of anarcho-pop-punk band Chumbawamba, revisits his past in I Get Knocked Down, in an attempt to reconnect with the anarchist ideal that he and his fans, in the North and beyond, refuse to abandon. The same fervor and perseverance is at the heart of Hanging On, where a former coal-mining community stands united in the face of eviction. Fighting against the odds in Horvath, Sheffield’s Muay Thai local heroes invite us into the ring and into the homes of the Roma community, to teach us about family, love and belonging. A warrior in his own right, TicToc’s Felix navigates growing up, while overcoming the hurdles and prejudices he experiences as someone with Tourette syndrome.

Northern Focus is about strength in all its forms: the kind you find in the roots of a community, in the patient, nurturing hands of an amateur gardener, or in the uncompromising determination of an aging rockstar. It’s the strength of a landscape, made by its people.

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— Manon Euler, Owen Jones, and Mita Suri

Growing Love Director(s): Claire Davies Producer(s): Claire Davies UK / 2020 / 7’ / English

Growing Love conveys the joy of nurturing plants and watching them grow, regardless of their shape, size, or species. Beginning with the wonder and awe of a seed, the film ponders how it is that so much life can germinate from even the smallest of things. Following the activities of an amateur gardener, Growing Love is narrated through an autobiographical voice.

The film tells tales of the relationships people build with plants, examines their day-to-day nurturing, and weaves in personal perspectives on what society considers as conventionally beautiful and worthy of our attention.

Sales: Claire Davies

Hanging On

Director(s): Alfie Barker Producer(s): Hollie Bryan UK / 2021 / 10’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Cosmosquare Films

Set in Oulton, Leeds, a former coal-mining community in which over 60 houses still stand, Hanging On spotlights the strength of a neighborhood that unites when faced with eviction. Originally made as temporary council housing, these homes were later sold onto private investors. Now, demolition is being threatened, an act which would result in the displacement of a large number of residents, some of whom have lived here all of their lives. Featuring a combination of audio interviews and artistically-lensed visual materials, Hanging On uncovers the stories of a close community of residents in the area, hearing their nostalgic memories of the place, and the stress caused by the uncertain fate of their ongoing campaign to save their homes. Hanging On reminds us about the struggles of people slipping through the cracks of society and explores what it means to have a home.

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Horvath Director(s): Jim Wraith Producer(s): Sam Barnett UK / 2021 / 45’ / World Premiere / English, Romany, Slovak

In and among the streets and gyms of Sheffield, Horvath follows a Roma Slovak family on their relentless journey through the kickboxing ranks. Uprooting his family from Slovakia to England, where they settled in Page Hall, Sheffield, in 2012, Ladislav Horvath took the decision to pursue his dream of kickboxing stardom, which his family have supported. Now a local hero, Ladislav has fought on the national Muay Thai and K-1 kickboxing circuit, with the adoration of a close and loyal following who have travelled with him up and down the length of the country. Set against the gritty backdrop of regional and national fight competitions, the film shows the reality of life in the ring.

Sales: Hidden Pictures North

I Get Knocked Down

Director(s): Sophie Robinson Producer(s): Dunstan Bruce UK / 2021 / 87’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: So&So Pictures Ltd 148

I Get Knocked Down is the untold story of Leedsbased anarcho-pop band Chumbawamba. Founding band-member Dunstan Bruce is 59, and he is struggling with the fact that the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. Twenty years after his fall from grace, Bruce is angry and frustrated, but how does a retired middle-aged radical get back up again? In this punk version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Dunstan is visited by the antagonistic ghost of his anarchist past – his alter ego, ‘Babyhead’ – who forces him to question his own life, sending him on a search for his long-lost anarchist mojo. Following Bruce’s personal voyage of rediscovery, redemption, and reawakening, I Get Knocked Down acts as a call to arms to those who think activism is best undertaken by someone else.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Jun Director(s): Sel MacLean Producer(s): Sel MacLean UK / 2021 / 6’ / World Premiere / English

Jun explores the ideas of South Korean craftsman Jun Rhee, and his view on the importance of handmade ceramics over factory made tableware in today’s society.

Sales: Sel MacLean

Tales from a Hard City

Director(s): Kim Flitcroft Producer(s): Alex Usborne, Jacques Bidou France, UK / 1995 / 80’ / English, French

Sales: Picture Palace North 149

It is 1993, and Sheffield is reeling from the collapse of heavy industry. Kim Flitcroft’s Tales from a Hard City follows four individuals as they battle for survival in the post-industrial landscape of the city. Car thief Glen dreams of being a singer. Paul is a boxer who secretly wants to become a celebrity. Wayne, a media mogul, approaches tabloid sensation Sarah upon her return to Sheffield, after she makes news for being arrested in Greece for dirty dancing. Wayne wants to launch her into the big time. These four cross paths one night at Josephine’s, a nightclub in the city, and all their lives irreversibly connect. An award-winning film on release, Tales from a Hard City has since become something of a cult film, counting a range of pop stars as fans – including Mogwai, The Chemical Brothers, and Jarvis Cocker.

Northern Focus

The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory Director(s): Sema Basharan Producer(s): Sema Basharan UK / 2021 / 7’ / World Premiere / English

Sales: Sema Basharan

Bradford is a diverse, multi-faith city, with a history of peace activism and grassroots resistance. Its religious diversity has inspired people and movements whose faith has motivated them for works of peacebuilding. Through documenting the memories of faithbased activists in Bradford, The Branches Are Hope; The Roots Are Memory explores the links between Bradford’s religious diversity, peace heritage, and grassroots activism; it is an audio-visual portrait of a unique aspect of Bradford’s culture. Through the memories of Bradford’s peace activists, filmmaker Sema Basharan explores her own relationship with her home city in a personal reflection inspired by the oral history recordings. This inter-faith film aims to document, interpret and share the often-overlooked voices of peace in the city, and explore their place in Bradford’s unique culture and collective memory.

Nominated for: the Short Film Award

Tictoc Director(s): Mark Waters Producer(s): Jeff Hordley, Zoe Henry, Sophie Powles, Mark Waters UK / 2020 / 22’ / UK Premiere / English

Felix is 16 years old. Across his life, he’s had to contend with the unpredictable and consuming nature of Tourette’s syndrome – and has recently had to do so while navigating the trials and tribulations of adolescence. He wants to share his story, and break the stigma.

Sales: Festival Forum Ltd 150

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Video Villanelle (for distance) Director(s): Catriona Gallagher Producer(s): Catriona Gallagher UK / 2020 / 17’ / Festival Premiere / English

Sales: Catriona Gallagher

Incidental phone videos from the artist’s camera reel are edited into the poetic form of a villanelle. Portrait-format clips – filmed to send to distant loved ones or to capture instances of caught attention – show fragments of events that lie between movement and stasis. Two lives between two countries follow an A-B-A rhyming structure, with sequences of birds in flight appearing as repeating refrains. Swallows above an Aegean beach at sundown and a murder of crows against northern skies; streetlight glow by motorbike and puddled lanes by bicycle; a hand clasping a leaf and sunlight over bare knees in transit. When and why do we choose to capture such moments? Can a life be lived between places in a year of lockdowns and the end of freedom of movement? Video Villanelle (for distance) reflects on changing relationships to home during lockdown.

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Retrospective

Films belong to those who need them – fragments from the history of Black British Cinema

This year, we want to spotlight and celebrate the history of Black British screen culture: a wide and diverse filmography that has been largely overlooked and undervalued in film discourse. We want to find connections between past and present, to spark a conversation about how this work resonates with contemporary filmmakers and artists, and how it can inspire and inform the ways in which we conceive our own communities. With such an abundant

and complex body of work, we present programmes curated by people who inhabit this history through their own work, their existential pursuits, and their curiosity and care, with works by voices that could multiply and intersect. This is the beginning of an ongoing series that we want to bring back in the following editions, as a place for reframing history and building access.

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SE24 - HD4 - SW3.

Posting Codes In this programme, the underlying principle of what constitutes home links together films by Clovis Salmon (aka ‘Sam The Wheels’), Topher Campbell and Sandi Hudson-Frances. These films discuss ideas of place, space, migration, community, location and disloca-

tion, and remind us of how important it is to post the codes of our own stories.

— Mark Sealy, Curator

The Great Conflict, Brixton Riots & Other Films

Director(s): Clovis Salmon aka ‘Sam the Wheels’ UK / Various / 43’ / English, Jamaican Patois

Four short films featuring rare footage of Brixton during the 1960s to 1980s by Clovis Salmon, aka ‘Sam The Wheels’. A self-taught filmmaker, Salmon began filming his neighbourhood in Brixton in 1959. His unique archive of Super 8 celluloid films includes church and community events, activism, local struggles and the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton Riots. Clovis Salmon was born in Jamaica in 1930, and was among the first generation of migrants from the West Indies to settle in the United Kingdom, arriving in London in November 1954. Having run his own bike shop in Jamaica, he joined Holdsworth Cycle Co. as a bicycle repair man, and soon became known as ‘Sam the Wheels’.

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The Homecoming: A short film about Ajamu Director(s): Topher Campbell Producer(s): Topher Campbell, Randy Simon UK / 1995 / 15’ / English

It’s 1995 and Ajamu, a Black Queer photographer, is staging his first one man show in his hometown of Huddersfield. He’s broke and his electricity is about to be cut off. How can he get there from London? On his journey he meets some friends and foes, including his best friend Michael and a hot homophobic guy who he cruises on the streets. There is insightful commentary by Stuart Hall and artist Sonia Boyce, as well as images of a Brixton long changed by gentrification and the influx of white people. Eventually Ajamu is escorted by a handsome chauffeur and ultimately is able to declare who he is and his place in the world.

Sales: Topher Campbell

Super Sam

Director(s): Sandi Hudson-Francis Producer(s): Sandi Hudson-Francis UK / 2019 / 44’ / English

A portrait documentary about 93 year old Clovis Salmon. Using Clovis’ personal Super 8 film archive mixed with Sandi Hudson-Frances’ own footage of Clovis, the film tells the story of Clovis’ journey from Jamaica 1930 to the present day.

Sales: Sandi Hudson-Francis

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Remember/ Re-evaluate/Review

We’ve chosen these films for our programme at Sheffield DocFest as we wanted to speak on how Black people have been portrayed in the media since the early 70s. Upon researching these films, Black representation on screen (when dictated to by the mainstream) will always resort back to the stereotypical, lazy tropes that seem to continuously fill the airwaves: we’re either taking all the jobs, or we’re work shy.

We’re trouble makers, or we should be grateful to be here.

Rather than hear our voices, the only time we’re spoken in the mainstream is when we’re being spoken down to – being told what is and isn’t racist by people who have never experienced it. The government’s recent ‘enquiry’ into structural racism provided us with nothing but yet another example of an inept administration that has become extremely skilled at marking its own homework, telling us that there is no evidence of institutional racism. Our voices have been silenced, our experiences have been ignored.

This idea of silencing marginalised voices is something that the brilliant documentary It Ain’t Half Racist Mum, hosted by cultural critic Stuart Hall and actress/activist Maggie Steed and shown in 1979, covers. At this time the BBC, who to this day continue to hold themselves to impartiality, repeatedly gave platforms to right wing leaders such as Enoch Powell and David Duke, while portraying Black People as the problem and never giving them the opportunity to speak. Instead, shows such as Til Death Do Us Part offered poorly drawn caricatures which happily reinforced the ‘uneducated’ tropes that were lapped up by the mainstream. We will be in conversation with Ashley Clark, curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, about this work, and why it deserves to be remembered, re-evaluated, and reviewed.

The Black Safari, directed by Horace Ove, is a film with its tongue firmly lodged in its cheek, but one that attempts to show how the ‘intrepid explorer explains weird foreign rituals’ format is one that presents

itself as education, while othering different, ‘strange’ cultures. We wanted to explore, through the film The Psychosis of Whiteness, how films such as Amistad, Belle, and Amazing Grace have sought to incorrectly reposition Britain as the great saviours of enslaved Black people, leading to privilege and superiority over others. This mindset, argues the film’s narrator and co-writer Professor Kehinde Andrews, reinforces the way Black People are thought of and seen. As the documentary mentions, despite films looking at slavery, Black people only serve as narrative props, plot devices that seek to somehow minimise Britain as a major beneficiary of the slave trade. In the hands of the powers that be, ours are the voices that are always the first to be silenced.

Our final two films then, demonstrate what happens when we take hold of our own narrative. Originally banned when first released, Blacks Britannica is an honest take of Black life in the late 1970s. No narrator is necessary to explain the context; instead we hear directly from activists and members of the community as they speak candidly on the impact institutional racism has on their existence, from employment to education.

We are especially grateful to Margaret Henry, head researcher of Blacks Britannica who has provided us with an exclusive introduction ahead of its screening.

Stationary Peaceful Protest documents saxophonist, poet, and filmmaker Xhosa Cole’s experiences at a Black Lives Matter protest in Birmingham in the summer of 2020. It inspired him to pen a monologue about his thoughts on his own personal experience of the occasion. Intertwining his own music into a recording of the monologue, he then collaborated with Birmingham-based animator Shiyi Li – the two of them then worked together to produce a beguiling, free-flowing, and absorbing short film which is both powerful and evocative.

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— Anthony and Teanne Andrews, We Are Parable, Curators

The Black Safari Director(s): Colin Luke Producer(s): BBC UK / 1972 / 60’ / English

The well-worn trope of the ‘intrepid white explorer attempts to explain the ways of African tribes’ is subverted in a masterful fashion by Horace Ové in The Black Safari. We follow Yemi Ajibade, Merdel Jordine, Bloke Modisane, Horace Ové, and Douglas Botting as they go on an expedition across the Liverpool-Leeds canal in search of the English community and the strange cultures that they currently involve themselves in, all while attempting to find the centre of England. The imagery of the Queen of Spades, the boat that the explorers travel on, complete with the sound of African drums going through these towns in middle England feels provocative, especially as baffled locals look on in astonishment. The little seen The Black Safari makes for compelling viewing; it is a biting satire that never fails to raise a smile.

Stationary Peaceful Protest

Director(s): Xhosa Cole, Shiyi Li Producer(s): Xhosa Cole, Shiyi Li UK / 2020 / 12’ / English

Sales: Xhosa Cole 156

In the summer of 2020, as the world looked on as yet another Black man was murdered by the police, global protests in support of Black Lives Matter took place, with the intention of calling out overt and systemic racism wherever it resided. We are honoured to show Stationary Peaceful Protest, an animated film by jazz musician and composer Xhosa Cole and Birmingham based animator Shiyi Li, as it looks at Xhosa’s experiences of attending a BLM protest in Birmingham. It inspired him to pen a monologue about his thoughts on his own personal experience of the occasion. Intertwining his own music into a recording of the monologue, he then collaborated with Birmingham-based animator Shiyi Li - the two of them then worked together to produce a beguiling, free-flowing, and absorbing short film which is both powerful and evocative.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

The Psychosis of Whiteness Director(s): Eugene Nulman Producer(s): Eugene Nulman UK / 2018 / 77’ / English

The Psychosis of Whiteness sheds light on society’s perceptions of race and racism by exploring cinematic representations of the slave trade. This documentary takes an in-depth look at big budget films that focus on the transatlantic slave trade and, using a wealth of sources and interviews, makes an argument that these depictions are metaphoric hallucinations about race. Rather than blaming the powerful institutions that are responsible for slavery, these films rewrite history by praising those same institutions for abolishing the slave trade.

Sales: Eugene Nulman

Blacks Britannica

Director(s): David Koff Producer(s): David Koff, Msindo Mwinyipembe UK / 1978 / 54’ / English

Sales: Postcolonial Films Ltd 157

Initially banned upon its release in 1978, Blacks Britannica is a significant entry into the canon of documentations of the lives of Black People in Britain. At the time, Black people were portrayed in the media as caricatures, paradoxically seen either as ‘taking all of the jobs’, or as ‘work shy’, even criminal. We rarely heard about the Black experience in Britain from the Black community. In this documentary, activists and citizens replace a narrator as they explore the impact that systemic racism has on them: from police harassment, the inability to find work, to the world of education. With its honest take on the state of affairs and a fear of subsequent protests and uprisings resulting from its broadcast, David Koff’s film was banned. Its message was deemed too rousing at the time.

Retrospective

It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum Director(s): Stuart Hall Producer(s): Campaign Against Racism in the Media UK / 1979 / 30’ / English

In September 2020, Tim Davie was appointed as the Director General of the BBC, and immediately cited the need for the corporation to show impartiality at all times, with the intention of returning to its original charter of providing a balanced view of global events.

In what is a blistering half hour of television, Stuart Hall and Maggie Steed’s 1979 essay It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum shows that while the BBC would state how impartial they were, they were anything but. Instead, they provided a platform for outwardly racist figures like Enoch Powell and David Duke, whilst simultaneously silencing the voices of Black people. Shown as part of the Open Door series – in which the BBC would relinquish editorial control to those who made the programmes – It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum expertly manages to show how racism would be portrayed in the media for years to come.

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Destroy | Disturb | Disrupt - Decolonizing Queer Desire

Destroy | Disturb | Disrupt - Decolonizing Queer Desire brings together films from Black queer creators who make bold statements about sex, gender, and (de)colonisation. BLACKN3SS by Diego Paulino explodes with abandon, revelling in trans Blackety Black queer joy. In Umbilic by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, the looting of Africa comes back to haunt the Scottish shoreline. A former military fortress is now a refuge for gay cruising in Batería by Damian Sainz. In BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) Heidi (Jade) Ramírez uses African mother tongues and colonised language to explore bisexuality. Bloom

by A.T. is a moment for reclaiming the power of the pole for a Black man. MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) by Tanu Muino/Lil Nas X gains Black queer sexual agency by conquering Satan. In FETISH Topher Campbell naked in New York City challenges the desire for and fear of Black masculinity. And Isaac Julien’s The Attendant challenges us to examine our colonised racialised heteronormative desires vs loving fearlessly and queerly.

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— Campbell X, Curator

NEGRUM3 / BLACKN3SS Director(s): Diego Paulino Producer(s): Victor Casé Brazil / 2018 / 22’ / Portuguese

Between melanin and far away planets, BLACKN3SS dives into the journey of the Black youth of São Paulo city. This is a documentary on Blackness, queerness, and the spacial aspirations of the diaspora’s children.

Sales: Reptilia Produções

Umbilic

Director(s): Natasha Thembiso Ruwona Producer(s): Natasha Thembiso Ruwona UK / 2021 / 15’ / English

Umbilic is an essay film that expands on the current discourse of Hydrofeminism through a mapping of research into water, following the line of a Black Feminist Geographical framework. An excavation into Scotland’s Black history, this work began in 2020, which incidentally was the ‘Year of Scottish Coasts and Waters’. The work asks: what can we learn from water? Fluidity, impermanence, ease of movement, care, methods of listening, tenderness – these are some possible answers. We can liquify ourselves, and look to water to guide us, provide answers, or inspire questions. Umbilic is an offering; it is forever incomplete.

Sales: Natasha Thembiso Ruwona 160

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Batería Director(s): Damian Sainz Producer(s): Javier Ferreiro Cuba, Spain / 2016 / 15’ / Spanish

The ruins of an ancient military fortress outside Havana have become a clandestine gay cruising spot.

The old walls and the rubble give shelter not only to Cuban homosexuals, but also to a culture of resistance and socialisation.

Sales: GONELLA PRODUCTIONS

BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) Director(s): Heidi (Jade) Ramírez Producer(s): Fatou (Dafne C.), Heidi (Jade) Ramírez Spain / 2021 / 7’ / Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Wolof

‘BMB’ stands for Black, Muslim and Bi. BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) is a compilation of four poems where Dafne C. learns how to forgive, forget, and re-love themselves. Life is not easy when everything, and everybody, is telling you that who you are is wrong.

BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) explains the states Dafne C. went through before finally coming to accept who they really are. This work is an ode to those for whom freedom might be hard to reach.

Sales: Fatou Cabo Diagne 161

Retrospective

Bloom Director(s): A.T., Journal du Pôle Producer(s): Fringe of Colour, Tao-Anas Le Thanh Kenya, UK / 2020 / 5’ / English

Sales: Journal du Pôle

Set to the lilting tones of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s honeyed rasp, Bloom is a queer African pole dancer’s surreal adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, inspired by Ballet Black’s production A Dream Within a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Filmed against a scene of glossy anthuriums and fluorescent birds of paradise, a vibrant bouquet dissolves, revealing a portrait of an African body wreathed on a steel pole, in various states of limbo: an analogy for queerness itself. In a state of nature, pole dance – like queerness – is innocent. However, stigma attaches a perceived and misconceived immorality. Through a system of prisms and mirrors, attention is first drawn to an anthurium’s spike-shaped inflorescence, which bears small flowers with perfect male and female parts. Focus then shifts to a pole in perspective, superimposed against the lingering red silhouette of an anthurium’s queer premise, the desire to be.

MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) Director(s): Tanu Muino, Lil Nas X Producer(s): Frank Borin, Ivanna Borin, Saul Levitz, Marco De Molina USA / 2021 / 3’ / English

Sales: UnderWonder Content 162

The story opens in a lush Garden of Eden where Nas first introduces the theme of duality, which is displayed throughout the video. He plays the role of Adam as well as the snake that tempts him into giving in to the carnal desires he was forbidden to explore, and we see the two merge and become one. Following a nod to Plato’s Symposium displayed on the tree of life, a shackled up Nas finds himself at his execution day in the Colosseum, where he is surrounded by and receiving judgment from various versions of himself.

Once he has been executed, he ascends to heaven only to be pulled down to hell where he harnesses his sexuality to seduce the devil and strip him of his power as an evil force — and dismantling the throne of judgment and punishment that has kept many of us from embracing our true selves out of fear.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Fetish Director(s): Topher Campbell Producer(s): Topher Campbell, Randy Simon UK, USA / 2018 / 17’ / English

Fetish, a multi-dimensional being, bestrides the streets of New York City. As his strength and vulnerability are exposed, he reveals his power through death and rebirth. As he defies space and time, Fetish becomes the embodiment of the ‘Black Man Who Fell To Earth’. His last moments are a mixture of traffic-stopping masculine power, supernatural presence, and nakedness.

Sales: Topher Campbell

The Attendant

Director(s): Isaac Julien Producer(s): Mark Nash UK / 1993 / 8’ / English

A young white man visits a gallery of old master paintings. When the museum closes, he stays behind, arousing the sexual fantasies of an older Black museum attendant. In one of these fantasies, François-Auguste Biard’s 19th-century painting The Slave Trade (Slaves on the West Coast of Africa) metamorphosises into a group of leather-clad gay men. With an activist’s commitment, Isaac Julien takes a look at the sexual and racist dynamics of power from a cultural-historical perspective. Made with the support of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982-1998), in a period under the sway of Thatcherism and the AIDS crisis, the film impressively and poetically explores the topics of imperialism, queer self-determination, lust, and death.

Sales: Isaac Julien Studio 163

Retrospective

Sonic Register: British black womxn and onscreen performativity

Track 1 Complexity is the theme for the first in a three-strand programme, Sonic Register: British black womxn and onscreen performativity. Performativity is the ‘doing’ work of images of British black womxn achieved through audio and visual cues to create for audiences ideas and impressions that operate over and above that required for the success of the internal narrative of a film. Yasmin Nicholas’ Sequence to a Dream is a choreographed rendition of her encounter with Caribbean ancestors. Zinzi Minott’s Fi Dem is ‘a durational work‘ produced annually to commemorate the Empire Windrush docking in the UK on 22 June 1948.

Rabz Lansiquot’s visual essay, Where did We Land?

invites us to consider freedom beyond the impasse of the dialectics of representation. Each artist’s film contributes to ongoing conversations on filmmaking and modalities of an African Caribbean diaspora. Several generative encounters inform the situatedness of the programme. These are: Films in Dialogue (Lux Moving Image, 2019), Sankofa Whispers: Remembering, Reflecting and Reframing (Regent Street Cinema, 2019), The Experimenta Debate (London Film Festival, ICA, 2019) and Yasmin Nicholas in Conversation (Brent Biennial, 2020).

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— Judah Attille

Sequence to a Dream Director(s): Yasmin Nicholas Producer(s): Yasmin Nicholas UK / 2018 / 4’ / English

Sequence to a Dream revolves around one person’s conscience: it is a cross between dream and reality, and a deep look into identity and what it means to subconsciously explore one’s self. The poem featured in the film, created and narrated by artist Yasmin Nicholas, explains the artist’s desire to explore the diaspora through her own heritage. Three ancestral spirits visit the artist, and provide her with an understanding of the identity of an artist, by a process of validation, shown through the granting of gifts.

Sequence to a Dream contrasts bright dresses with the dreariness of London’s urban scenes, showing how one can change oneself through knowledge and culture.

Sales: Yasmin Nicholas

Fi Dem

Director(s): Zinzi Minott UK / 2018 / 6’ / Patois, English

Fi Dem is a durational work, a continued investigation into Blackness and Diaspora, and the title of the first video in a body of work that will be made annually on the anniversary of the Empire Windrush docking in the UK, 22nd June 1948; Fi Dem was first released 22nd June 2018. The piece journeys through Minott’s personal diasporic journey and takes the moment of Windrush Day to focus on those that move and have been moved, those who stay and cannot leave, and all of the slippage in between. Shifting between personal and community moments of loss and joy that sit at the border, Minott hopes this work can add to a conversation about these experiences.

Sales: Zinzi Minott 165

Retrospective

where did we land Director(s): Rabz Lansiquot Producer(s): Rabz Lansiquot UK / 2019 / 30’ / English

Sales: Rabz Lansiquot

For many Black people around the world, this past decade has been defined by an increase in documented and reported instances of state-sanctioned violence, exaggerated by an over-saturation of images of that violence disseminated through news outlets, blockbusters, experimental films, and social media. where did we land is an ongoing artistic experiment by Rabz Lansiquot interrogating the effect of these widespread images of anti-Black violence on society, justice, and on the psyches of those Black people who encounter them.

The film takes the form of a moving image essay that speaks to the problem of spectacle for Black subjects on-screen. It features 900 abstracted still archival images that span the African diaspora, both spatially and temporally, accompanied by a text that references thinkers Tina Campt, Saidiya Hartman, Guy Debord, Frank B. Wilderson III, Ruun Nuur, Susan Sontag and more.

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Track 2 Dancer and filmmaker Zinzi Minott is interested in ‘the freedom that unfree people find in moving their own body’. Fi Dem II aesthetically peaks above acceptable Db levels. Menelik Shabazz’s realist drama Burning an Illusion chants out a prophetic Nyabinghi drumbeat, and Pat’s shifting linguistic register vacillates between fulfilling her preconceived desires for a romantic life or political activism. Pat (Cassie McFarlane) and her friends Sonia (Beverley Martin) and Cynthia (Angela Wynter) are characters that operate exclusively within a heteronormative tradition in which men affirm womxn’s reality. Pats steely independent core carries the suspense in the drama. The narrative arc of her

changing value system goes from that of a carefree office girl in a pussy-bow blouse via hashtag metoo to a compassionate community campaigner dressed in layers of modesty clothing. Burning an Illusion remains a milestone in the representation of British black life on British screens. Pat’s is the generation who years later would suffer casualties from a ‘hostile environment’ created by UK government policy and the ongoing scandal of detentions and deportations of ‘children of the Windrush’.

— Judah Attille

Fi Dem II

Director(s): Zinzi Minott UK / 2019 / 9’ / Patois, English

Fi Dem II is part of a continued investigation into Blackness and Diaspora, created as part of a body of work that will be made annually on the anniversary of the Empire Windrush docking in the UK on 22nd June 1948. Zinzi Minott reflects on the first National Windrush Day, which sits in the middle of UK Pride Month, and seems to get lost among it. What does this mean for those who, like her – Black British first and second generation children and grandchildren of Windrush migrants – are LGBTQI+? This film asks: whose labour is it to remember this day? It also explores the work of her maternal Grandmother Doreen Haynes, a nurse of 52 years.

Sales: Zinzi Minott 167

Retrospective

Burning an Illusion Director(s): Menelik Shabazz Producer(s): Vivien Pottersman UK / 1981 / 101’ / English

A pioneering first feature from Menelik Shabazz, Burning an Illusion marked a coming of age for Black British cinema. A film about transformation and identity, it is a love story that traces the emotional and political growth of a young Black couple in Thatcher’s London.

It was the first British film to give a central voice to a Black woman, charting her journey to emotional maturity, emancipation, and political awakening. Pat Williams (Cassie McFarlane) is a London girl with a caring family, her own flat, and a job that she enjoys, who looks forward to settling down to a comfortable married life. Her dream is shattered when she meets Del (Victor Romero), a charming but vaguely discontented toolmaker, who soon moves in and then loses his job, causing them both to challenge their assumptions about each other and their aspirations.

Sales: Menelik Shabazz

Track 3 The third and final programme in Sonic Register: British black womxn and onscreen performativity listens to undercurrents of self-possession and sartorial feminism in Julian Henriques’ feature Baby Mother and attends to ancestor reverence, violent displacement and care in Zinzi Minott’s epic memorial Fi Dem III. The deep blue sea levels are so incredibly high that there is no horizon in Zinzi Minott’s Fi Dem III. It’s tense. Baby Mother opens with Anita (Anjela Lauren Smith), her friends Sharon (Caroline Chikezie) and Yvette (Jocelyn Esien), who give a body confident

street performance intercut with shots of appreciative boys and men. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall safeguards his modesty by putting into parentheses and quotation marks ‘pussy power’. The sexualised body is the context of a musical feature film for a commercial market, inspired by Dance Hall aesthetics, singers Triller Jenna, dee-jay Cinderalla and Music Consultant Carroll Thompson.

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— Judah Attille

Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference

Director(s): Zinzi Minott UK / 2020 / 11’ / Patois, English

Sales: Zinzi Minott

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Fi Dem III: Ancestral Interference, like preceding instalments of Zinzi Minott’s project, invokes the HMT Empire Windrush’s mid-century voyage from Jamaica to London – except now we see it placed explicitly alongside emblems of the transatlantic slave trade. Minott is aware of the slave ship’s hold, stretching across centuries of Black Caribbean history into the present, but the artist also turns our attention to the legacies of Black Caribbean life, sound, resistance, and communion within its diaspora. Fi Dem III: Ancestral Inference draws from personal and familial archives to chart several Black Caribbean journeys and narratives, some of which have been imaged and returned to throughout the series.

For Minott, a trained dancer who was raised within sound system culture, Fi Dem’s clashing images and sounds are a way of ‘editing with the body’ to create the feeling of movement central to her training, and to the migratory lives of Black Caribbeans.

Retrospective

Babymother Director(s): Julian Henriques Producer(s): Parminder Vir OBE, Tracey Seaward UK / 1998 / 82’ / English

Anita’s got style, energy and attitude. Her ambition is to become the local dancehall diva, but before she can triumph with her ‘rude girl’ friends deejaying her lyrics on stage, she has to prove herself – and she has some growing up to do along the way. It’s a rough road.

Bringing up two children alone on a tough housing estate is no easy matter; neither are her relationships with her mother, sister and the children’s father, Byron, a singer with his own ambitions.

Sales: Film4

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Looking Black The films collected in the separate programmes span almost 40 years. Together they interrogate and explore the politics and aesthetics of personal identity, national histories and collective memory. Blood Ah Go Run, Twilight City and Looking For Langston are classics of British independent cinema – along with other works made in the 1980s and 1990s they marked the emergence of independent black voices – assertive, critical, resistant and keen to explore all aspects of black British identity as a lived experience in direct and dynamic new ways on screen. More recent works

such as Second Coming and Amine, in contrasting ways, use a female lens to explore family and a sense of belonging. Art history has long ignored black artists. The third programme presents a selection of black British artists working across film and moving image to explore race and national representation, female visibility, and poetically reimagine identities across geographies, time and place.

— Karen Alexander, Curator

Tales of the City It is 40 years since 13 young people were murdered by racists fire-bombing a birthday party in New Cross, London. The first three films in this programme, Tales of the City, are very different responses to that event.

The last film weaves fact with fiction to explore deeply

personal ideas of race, place, and belonging set against the background of 1980s London.

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— Karen Alexander, Curator

Blood Ah Go Run Director(s): Menelik Shabazz, Imruh Caesar Producer(s): Menelik Shabazz UK / 1981 / 20’ / English

This short film looks back at 1981, an important year in the annals of Black British history, but one which began so tragically with the death of 13 young Black people in a fire during a birthday party in New Cross, London. This incident shook-up the Black community and caused a national outrage. To this today, it is a crime for which no one has been arrested or charged.

The anger in the Black community led to the greatest march of Black people on the streets of London, a march of anger and solidarity that became known as the Black People’s Day of Action. This film captures exclusive footage of this march that started in Deptford, South London, before travelling through the centre of London.

Sales: Menelik Shabazz

JUS SOLI Director(s): somebody nobody Producer(s): somebody nobody UK / 2015 / 16’ / English

By interrupting the emotional transition between generations and questioning what it means to be British, JUS SOLI opens up a discourse on the Black British experience. A poetic journey charting the changing emotions of Britain’s Black population, from a Caribbean on the SS Windrush – full of hope and love for the ‘motherland’ – to a disaffected British youth, angry, alienated and marginalised in British society.

The film also shines light on the under-represented tragedy of the 13 British youths who were killed in The New Cross House Fire, on 18th January 1981. Splicing together archive footage and filmed scenes with other sounds and images, JUS SOLI builds a picture of an empire struggling to relinquish its colonial powers.

Sales: somebody nobody

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Something Said Director(s): Jay Bernard Producer(s): Jacqui Davies UK / 2017 / 10’ / English

Sales: Sprung Sultan

The New Cross Fire was a major tragedy in 1981 that claimed the lives of 13 young Black people, and was initially met with state, media, and police indifference.

Haunted by that history, and in the context of the recent rise of the far-right and the tragedy of Grenfell, Jay Bernard’s film Something Said undertakes a queer exploration of black British history, starting with this particular moment in time and examining its ramifications at two scales: the larger social and political rupture that followed the fire, and the smaller, individual attempt to reconcile one’s queer present and the black radical past. Drawing from the debris of history, Something Said explodes the homogeneity of our times, interspersing it with ruins to reveal a wider perspective of life in the UK, where past and present are folded within each other on both social and intimate scales.

Twilight City Director(s): Black Audio Film Collective Producer(s): Avril Johnson UK / 1989 / 52’ / English

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After 10 years in Dominica, Octavia’s mother Eugenia wants to return to London to live with her daughter again, but old resentments, hurt, and anger resurface.

Meanwhile, interviewees - including Paul Gilroy, Gail Lewis, George Shires, Homi Bhaba, Rosina Visram and David Yallop - discuss how London has changed through the centuries and talk about the changes wrought by the Conservative Government through the 1980s. The interviewees talk about the people on the margins and how they survive. Meanwhile Octavia writes to her mother about their strained relationship, how the London she left behind is no longer the same as the one Octavia inhabits. She tries to understand her mother’s life, why, for example, she joined the Conservative Party and took comfort in the Church while Octavia and her friends demonstrated for gay rights. Octavia would like to have her mother’s faith but not her mother’s silence.

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Black-Eyed Susans This programme focuses on the work of two Black women writers and filmmakers. Each work articulates different ideas of personal politics and psychological states related to family, domestic space, survival, and aspirations for future generations.

— Karen Alexander, Curator

Second Coming

Director(s): debbie tucker green Producer(s): Polly Leys, Kate Norrish, Hillbilly Films UK / 2015 / 105’ / English

In London, Jackie (Nadine Marshall) is pregnant but knows it’s not her husband’s (Idris Elba). She says she hasn’t slept with anybody else, but now she doesn’t know if she is losing her mind. Communication, trust, and intimacy are at the heart of this warm, fearless family drama as Jackie struggles to explain news of her pregnancy. Over the course of a year the film follows Jackie, husband Mark and their 11 year old son JJ (Kai Francis Lewis) as this ordinary family struggles for answers as accusations start to fly. Playing with the idea of a contemporary Immaculate Conception, this film deftly explores complex ideas through an arresting narrative form.

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Amine Director(s): Beverley Bennett Producer(s): Jacqui Davies UK / 2017 / 12’ / English

Amine features a tapestry of voices that reveal the multi-faceted and complex experiences of Black womxn in the UK today. Featuring testimonies from Black womxn all over the country, the stories of family, friends, friends-of-friends, and acquaintances from varying backgrounds and age groups are intricately woven together. The film is formed from a series of unstructured and conversational kitchen table interviews about societal perceptions on Black womxn as racialised bodies. Through these conversations, the fragments of positive and negative encounters and experiences – and the rainbow of emotions expressed – create a story of vulnerability, pain and joy that is at once liberatory and heartbreaking.

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Disrupting the Image External social realities and the dynamics of black representation are critiqued and contested in this selection of films from UK visual artists from across the generations. Ranging from the examination of nationality and sporting representation, the creative spirit, meditations on archival and found images of

black culture through to a poetic examination of Black gay male desire – each artist consciously engages with the aesthetic possibilities of their chosen medium.

— Karen Alexander, Curator

Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light

Director(s): Trevor Mathison, Edward George Producer(s): David Lawson UK / 1995 / 25’ / English

3 Songs on Pain Light and Time is a rarely seen video portrait in deliberately unbalanced colours, made by Trevor Mathison and Edward George and produced with Black Audio Film Collective.

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The Nation’s Finest Director(s): Keith Piper Producer(s): Janice Cheddie UK / 1990 / 7’ / English

This short video explores, through a collage of images, text and voiceover, some of the issues raised when Black athletes are called upon to ‘represent’ what have been historically seen as ‘White’ nations within the international sporting arena. Produced initially for Manchester Olympic Video Festival, the piece juxtaposes nationalistic heraldry and the heroic imagery found in public monumental sculpture, with the bodies of two young Black athletes. Through referencing historical legacies of the disenfranchisement and exclusion faced by Black people, the piece goes on to examine how the transition of the Black athlete from the periphery to the centre of the nation’s psyche, carries with it a network of contradictions and limitations. The final frame of the piece is the victory salute by Ben Johnson at the end of the men’s 100 metre final in Seoul – and the rest is history.

the words i do not have yet

Director(s): Phoebe Boswell Producer(s): Jacqui Davies UK / 2017 / 11’ / English

Phoebe Boswell combines traditional draftswomanship and digital technology in the words i do not have yet. The words of poet Audre Lorde and Kenyan writers Wambui Mwangi and Ndinda Kioka intermingle as various women’s voices are overlaid upon drawings of women’s contested bodies.

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Retrospective

Looking for Langston Director(s): Isaac Julien Producer(s): Mark Nash UK / 1989 / 40’ / Language

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In this lyrical and poetic consideration of the life of revered Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, filmmaker Isaac Julien invokes Hughes as a Black gay cultural icon, placing him against an impressionistic, atmospheric setting that parallels a Harlem speakeasy of the 1920s with an ‘80s London nightclub. Extracts from Hughes’ poetry are interwoven with the work of cultural figures from the 1920s and beyond, including black poets Essex Hemphill and Bruce Nugent, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, constructing a lyrical and multi-layered narrative. Julien explores the ambiguous sexual subtexts of a period of rich artistic expression, and the enduring cultural significance of these pioneers’ work. Shot in black-and-white by cinematographer Nina Kellgren, the film combines archival footage with newly staged set pieces, fantasy sequences, and an imagined love story. The result is a beautiful and ultimately celebratory piece about artistic expression and the nature of Black gay desire.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Black British Stories of Resistance It’s an honour to be asked to curate films for the 2021 Sheffield DocFest. I remember first coming to this festival in 1996, a few years before I went to the NFTS to study Documentary Directing. The DocFest at that time was relatively small and after a few days spent watching films, and meeting pretty much everyone in the whole festival, I felt like I had become part of a documentary family.

In my programme, Black British Stories of Resistance, I have chosen two films that are meaningful to me because of how they have influenced my own films. It gives me great pleasure to introduce The People’s Account – a documentary that was made in 1987 by Ceddo Film and Video Workshop. Ceddo were one of several Black British film collectives that had formed in the 1980s (with support from newly formed broadcaster Channel 4 and the GLC) as a response to the one-sided media depictions of the uprisings/riots that happened in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and other cities. I first saw The People’s Account in 2016 when it was shown as a double-bill cinema screening in Bristol, with my own film The Hard Stop – a film about the killing of Mark Duggan by police in 2011, which sparked one of the most severe riots in British History.

My friend, Menelik Shabazz, was at the screening. Menelik was one of the founding members of Ceddo and had made one of the first Black British films that I can remember watching on television as a young person in the 1980s: Burning An Illusion. The reasons why The People’s Account and The Hard Stop had been programmed as a double-bill became immediately clear.

The People’s Account records the aftermath of the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, and is appropriately titled because we hear from the actual residents of the Broadwater Farm Estate – such as my good friend Stafford Scott and Floyd Jarret, whose mother suffered a fatal heart attack after police raided her home. This was the incident that sparked the disturbances on the estate which culminated in the killing of PC Blakelock. In The Hard Stop, I felt it was important to begin with a quote from Martin Luther King – ‘A riot is the language of the unheard’, and that’s why there’s no ‘voice of God’ style commentary in our film; the story is simply told by the people that knew Mark Duggan and grew up with him on The Broadwater Farm Estate.

At about 9.5 minutes into The People’s Account, the filmmakers conduct an interview with

Yvonne Hazlewood, who is a member of the Broadwater Farm Mother’s Project. In the aftermath of the Broadwater Farm riot Yvonne says: ‘That is the situation… an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’. She is speaking about the unfortunate cycle of violence they find themselves in when the only recourse to justice for the death of Mrs Jarrett (and ongoing police brutality) was by means of an uprising, which lead to the horrific murder of Police Constable Keith Blakelock. While Yvonne speaks, a little four year old girl runs up and talks to her – it’s her daughter.

That little girl is Simone Wilson, who appears in The Hard Stop 27 years later, when we interviewed her following the killing by police of her partner and father of her four children: Mark Duggan.

I urge you, when watching The People’s Account, to consider it as a product of the era in which it was made. Ceddo weren’t just making films about the Black struggle in the 1980s, they were the Black struggle. Ceddo operated like a guerrilla unit using film as a weapon. It fielded a film crew at riots in Handsworth, Brixton, and Tottenham, with the specific intention of documenting police behavior. In The People’s Account, the voiceover commentary is unashamedly partisan in its radical left-wing critique of the British State and its treatment of Black people.

This was Ceddo’s first film for Channel 4, though it was never screened – the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) objected to the voiceover commentary’s description of the police as “racist, lawless terrorists”, and to the description of the riot as a “legitimate act of self-defence”. The network asked for changes to be made. Ceddo refused.

The other film I have chosen is The Mangrove Nine by Franco Rosso. I would like people to watch this as an accompaniment to my own film currently showing on BBC iPlayer called Black Power: A British Story of Resistance about the British Black Power movement in the 1960s and 70s. We used archive from The Mangrove Nine in our film, and I took inspiration from the liberated way in which Franco Rosso uses archive footage, still photographs, filmed interviews, music and a filmed round table discussion among the nine defendants, and welds it all together seamlessly – often with a subversive sense of humour to make his political points.

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— George Amponsah, Curator

The Mangrove Nine

Director(s): Franco Rosso Producer(s): Franco Rosso, John La Rose UK / 1973 / 37’ / English

The Mangrove Nine trial resulted from conflict between the police and the Black community in Notting Hill that had escalated from the end of the 1960s onwards. The Mangrove case began when around 150 Black people protested against long-term police harassment of the popular Mangrove Restaurant in Ladbroke Grove. Franco Rosso’s The Mangrove Nine includes interviews with the defendants recorded before the final verdicts.

The People’s Account Director(s): Menelik Shabazz Producer(s): Milton Bryan UK / 1986 / 52’ / English

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The People’s Account looks at Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, the scene of serious rioting between police and the residents in 1984, taking the point of view of the Black community who live there. The film ran into trouble immediately with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), who objected to the description of the police as racist, lawless terrorists, and to the description of the riot as a legitimate act of self-defence. The IBA demanded editorial changes and when the filmmakers refused, the programme was pulled from the schedules, intended never to be shown on British television. It has since become available, earning acclaim for the members of the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop collective – Menelik Shabazz, Milton Bryan, Imruh Bakari, Lazell Daley, Chuma Ukpadi, June Reid, D. Elmina Davis, Glenn Ujebe Masokonane, Vusi Challenger, Sukai Eccleston and Dada Imarogbe – and a place in British history.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Redemption Song This is a series of seven documentaries in which Jamaican-born Stuart Hall examines the elements that make up the Caribbean, looking at the turbulent history of the islands and interviewing people who lived

there around the time of its release in 1991. In a programme selected by David Olusoga, Sheffield DocFest will feature two episodes: Episode 1: Iron In the Soul and Episode 7: Shades of Freedom.

Episode 1: Iron In The Soul Jenny Barraclough / Jenny Barraclough, George Carey / UK / 1991 / 50’ / English

Episode 7: Shades of Freedom Jenny Barraclough / Jenny Barraclough, George Carey / UK / 1991 / 50’ / English

In the first of seven programmes Stuart Hall explores the British legacy in the Caribbean. The diary of slaver Thomas Thistlewood provides an extraordinary view of the British in the Caribbean 200 years ago. Their imprint is still everywhere but has been transformed with time. Yet for cricketer Wes Hall the memory of colonial days has sharp edges.

The final part of Stuart Hall’s series exploring modern life in the Caribbean: Shades of Freedom. Hall visits his 100-year-old aunt, Geraldine Hall, who taught maths in the hut beside her house as she had done for 80 years.

But her pupils faced an uncertain future. Drugs and corruption threaten the island’s stability and tourism and television sap their identity. Stuart Hall’s personal search takes him from illegal ganja fields in Trinidad to an overgrown estate where his mother lived.

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Arts Programme

Welcome to the 2021 Sheffield DocFest Arts Programme. This area of the festival – formerly called Alternate Realities – includes a range of activities, from exhibitions and talks to events and new commissions that showcase the best in international contemporary art practice and research. Artists selected for our programme work across many forms, disciplines and subjects, interrogating and expanding the boundaries of non-fiction through moving images, immersive technologies, sound, performance and other media.

Beyond just a name change, the Arts Programme has been refocused towards bringing the contemporary arts sector in the UK into dialogue with a wide scope of international artists’ reflections and contexts. Centred around two group exhibitions – Here In This Room curated by Herb Shellenberger and Right On Time curated by Soukaina Aboulaoula – the programme is rich in works of aesthetic innovation, sociopolitical relevance, and urgency of form/content.

In total, this year’s Arts Programme will feature the work of over 30 artists from around the world, curated thoughtfully through a process of research, open-call submissions, and many discussions. The exhibitions were conceived and curated in a quite collaborative process, in accordance with the festival’s image and core spirit. Careful consideration has been given to the best way of presenting these works to audiences, whether shown in galleries, or on our online platform.

Responding to the present moment with this year’s hybrid festival, our goal is to connect viewers from our surrounding neighbourhoods in Sheffield with those on other continents. We look forward to seeing you, whether online, IRL, or – why not both!

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— Herb Shellenberger and Soukaina Aboulaoula Exhibitions Locations: Abbeydale Picture House, S1 Artspace, Site Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab, Sheffield DocFest Online Exhibitions Platform

Duncan Marquiss, Mirror Test, 2019

Here In This Room, perspectives on domestic ambience and surrealism

Locations: Site Gallery, 1 Artspace, Abbeydale Picturehouse, Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab, Online Exhibitions Platform This group exhibition focuses on the dual concepts of ‘domestic ambience’ and ‘domestic surrealism’, considering the ways that artists have depicted or reimagined living spaces, domestic labour/routines, or many different ideas of home. Intended as a productive feedback loop with the extraordinary circumstances that led many of us to be ‘stuck at home’ for many months on end, Here In This Room looks at the ways that artists have seen domestic spaces differently. Whether viewers encounter these works – produced across different years, geographies and perspectives – within the contemplative space of our exhibitions, or through our online platform in their own domestic space, the aim is for these art185

ists’ work to act as invitations to see and appreciate space in new, unintended and even fantastical ways.

This exhibition features works across different forms including moving image, installation, mixed media, sound and performance.

— Herb Shellenberger, Curator Artists: Anuj Malhotra, Bassam Al-Sabah, Basir Mahmood, Daïchi Saïto, David Haxton, Deborah Findlater, Duncan Marquiss, Geraldine Snell, Heesoo Kwon, Julie Ramage, Sam Smith, Séamus Harahan, Sophie Michael, Wanja Kimani

Arts Programme

Anuj Malhotra

Title: Yeh Woh (Turmoil) Year: 2020 Country: India Medium: Installation (text in English and Hindi, USB drives, video, 3’) Status: World Premiere Contact: anuj.malhotra@lightcube.in Website: lightcube.in Anuj Malhotra’s Yeh Woh (Turmoil) is a brief but potent distillation of the immensely volatile circumstances in India which are continually present. Using the extended metaphor of a house in woeful disrepair, the filmmaker grapples with the shocks and reverberations of state violence. But while a house can serve to protect from the turmoil lurking throughout the city, it can also become a fortress in which one locks themself away from others. Challenging his own engagement with collective protest, and the temptation to give in to feelings of middle-class apathy ingrained through one’s upbringing, the filmmaker continually plays on the dichotomy of outside and inside. “The ‘truth’ of the outside world has now entered our house and now lives inside our own ‘reality’; a horrific concoction.” Initially produced in January 2020 and shared as a video letter to the filmmaker’s friends, Yeh Woh (Turmoil) predates several major crises and collective struggles in India since.

Anuj Malhotra is a critic, filmmaker and cultural activist based in New Delhi, India. He founded the film collective Lightcube, a leading resource for pioneering research and presentation of image-forms in India, and has presented work at Berlin Critics’ Week, Goethe Institut’s Five Million Incidents and the Serendipity Arts Festival. He is currently in production with the hybrid documentary Tales from Building No. 37, funded by the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA).

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Basir Mahmood

Title: Sunsets, everyday Year: 2020 Country: Italy Medium: Moving image (HD digital, 15’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: basirmahmoodworkshop@gmail.com Website: basirmahmood.com Basir Mahmood’s Sunsets, everyday arises from research into the ethics of creating images depicting domestic violence, a global emergency made even more urgent by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than producing representations that could risk viewers reliving these traumas, Mahmood focuses on domestic violence as something that can be hidden from the outer world, and thus fills the film with images typically hidden from view. Taking as a starting point images that victims courageously shared on social media to encourage others to speak out, Mahmood commissioned a production unit in Lahore to film a repeated scene of domestic violence in his absence, based on his instructions and these images from social media. While the main crew was busy with their gruelling work, two camera operators constantly filmed the process, filming props, and showing the unseens side of the shoot. Tension, texture and movement are shown in oblique angles and perspectives too close for comfort. But the most evocative analogue that Mahmood utilises is the repetition of mundane tasks, underscoring the callous routine of domestic violence, a repetitive loop that must be broken.

Born in Pakistan and based between Lahore and Amsterdam, Basir Mahmood uses video, film and photography to create poetic sequences that contemplate embedded social and historical terrains of the ordinary as well as his personal milieu. His works have been widely shown, including at Lahore Biennale 2, 10th Berlin Biennale, Stedelijk Museum and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Bassam Al-Sabah

Title: Fenced within the silent cold walls Year: 2018 Country: Ireland Medium: Moving image (HD film, CGI, 13’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: bassam.alsabah@gmail.com Website: bassamalsabah.com instagram.com/this.isnowhere Bassam Al-Sabah’s Fenced within the silent cold walls is a CGI film which takes the viewer through a recreation of the artist’s former home in Iraq, a home that his family can no longer return to. Appearing from out of the expanse of an endless, desolate desert, the house is digitally rendered in detail, but as the viewer is led through, uncanny images are manifested into organic forms, erupting from abandoned communications devices. The film concludes with the voice of the artist’s grandmother, who narrates the moment when the family split and her children migrated to different parts of the world. “Within a second, I was left all alone, surrounded by all their memories.” As she describes burning these sentimental objects, we see a trash can on fire, with digital forms emerging from it before disintegrating. Complementing the film, Al-Sabah’s Familiar Scenes That Refuse to Stay is a series of paintings on glass, plexiglass and board that combines images from family photographs with anime cartoons, stacked and layered on top of each other, evoking the fading of memory.

Bassam Al-Sabah works across digital animation, painting, sculpture and textiles to convey intricate visions of war, resistance and perseverance. Themes such as displacement, nostalgia and personal mythology are explored through reference to Japanese anime cartoons, which were dubbed into Arabic and broadcast throughout the Middle East from the 1980s to today.

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Daïchi Saïto

Title: earthearthearth Year: 2021 Country: Canada Medium: Moving image (35mm film, 30’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: dsaitofilm@gmail.com Website: undergroundmines.com/commission-3-daichi-saito earthearthearth takes the majesty of the Andes mountain range in Chile as the starting point of an otherworldly journey. Across the film’s 30 minute duration, Daïchi Saïto continually shifts our view of the rocky landscape as colour, tone and presence are manipulated through 16mm analogue filmmaking techniques – including hand-processing, optical and contact printing, solarisation, cross-processing and bi-packing, to name a few. The film’s swirling, psychedelic visuals are married to a beautifully-undulating soundtrack by saxophonist Jason Sharp, led by emphasis on the composer’s own biorhythms (principally breathing and heartbeat). The body, just like the earth, is an important home for each of us. Through this evocative work, Saïto and Sharp equate both of these homes with the physical medium of celluloid film. Produced through analogue processes – captured on 16mm, edited primarily on film and blownup to 35mm – earthearthearth is here exhibited as the artist has intended, through 35mm projection. earthearthearth was commissioned as part of the Media City Film Festival project UNDERGROUND MINES, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Originally from Japan, Daïchi Saito is a filmmaker based in Montreal, where he co-founded the artist film collective Double Negative. His 2009 film Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis was named one of the “150 Essential Works in Canadian Cinema History” by Toronto International Film Festival in 2016. With Engram of Returning (2015), Saïto won a Tiger Award for Short Film at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Arts Programme

David Haxton

Title: Painting Room Lights Year: 1981 Country: USA Medium: Moving image (16mm-to-digital, 9’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: hax@cfl.rr.com Website: davidhaxton.art

David Haxton’s films investigate the medium of 16mm celluloid film, exploiting its mechanics in ways seldom explored by other artists. Through performative works that highlight the properties of light and darkness, motion and stasis, perception and illusion, Haxton creates unexpected and seemingly impossible worlds despite conveying simple scenarios and minimal editing. Painting Room Lights shows a performer painting four fluorescent lamps and making a drawing of a landscape with a rectangular solid in the foreground. He also makes a drawing of a room in one point perspective. Perspective, space and light are shifted through simple means. For example, when the performer paints the lamps, the scene is effectively washed out with light. This is because the 16mm film recording the event is in negative, so darkening the room will brighten the image. Haxton distorts the image, and the viewer’s expectations, with conceptual shifts that work their magic seductively and intuitively. The film’s caricature of a domestic room was recorded inside of a domestic space itself: Haxton’s live-in studio was where he conducted these filmic experiments in perception.

David Haxton is an artist who works primarily in photography and film. Selected exhibitions include Sonnabend Paris (solo, 1978), MoMA (1978), the Whitney Biennial (1979, 1981, 1983), Smithsonian American Art Museum (2012), Kanal Pompidou, Brussels (2018) and Fridman Gallery, New York (solo, 2019). His works are held in major collections including Centre Pompidou, SFMOMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

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Deborah Findlater

Title: Rituals Year: 2019 Country: UK Medium: Installation (3 monitors, MiniDV-to-digital, 12’) Contact: deborahfindlater@gmail.com Website: cargocollective.com/deborahfindlater Title: Nazar (bad energy stay far away) Year: 2019 Country: UK Medium: Mixed Media (rug, dyed by Charlene Sandy) Deborah Findlater’s multi-channel installation Rituals sites the self as a gateway for healing and care, promoting autonomy for Black women, femmes and non-binary folk. An artist-filmmaker and DJ, Findlater brings together immersive sound, moving images displayed across three monitors and a hand-dyed rug to create an installation that acts as a sacred space for the viewer to contemplate their own rituals of self-preservation. Findlater’s moving images relate her embodied experience, showing close-cropped perspectives of her body within the frame – nails being painted, hair braided and her face or body engaged with “curative, restorative touch,” as we hear described by Black Feminist theorist Hortense Spillers on the soundtrack. We view these actions while thinking about the places in which they take place; this work was recorded in the artist’s bedroom. Rituals brings the viewer into an environment of immersive intimacy, exploring the complex interplay between independence and interdependence.

Deborah Findlater is a visual, verbal and sonic artist born and based in South London. Across film, video, installation, poetry and sound pieces, her work centres Blackness from a queer, decolonial and feminist perspective. She is a member of London based QTIBPOC-led sound system Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) and has an MA in Experimental Film from Kingston School of Art.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Duncan Marquiss

Title: Contact Call Year: 2020 Country: UK Medium: Sound (Stereo sound, digital) Contact: duncanmarquiss@hotmail.com Website: duncanmarquiss.com Title: Mirror Test Year: 2019 Country: UK Medium: Moving Image (4K digital, 6’) Duncan Marquiss’s audio work Contact Call is a series of improvised instrumentals played on electric guitar, the result of the artist’s close study of bird calls heard in Glasgow during the coronavirus lockdown of 2020.

Birds’ vocalisations can transmit over long distances and cut through noisy environments, but the pause in human activity during the pandemic allowed us to hear them more clearly. Contact calls, as distinct from birdsong, are short phrases shared back and forth while foraging. These avian dialogues, where a nearby bird is answered by another at a distance, create patterns of call-and-response. Marquiss attempted to mimic bird calls with the guitar, imitating rhythmic phrases, high pitches and percussive sounds. Some sections sound bird-like, while other parts are extended improvisations, played in response to field-recordings of local birds. Contact Call was commissioned by The Common Guild, Glasgow.

Exhibited online alongside Contact Call, Marquiss’s moving image work Mirror Test is a portrait of Jacky, a female jackdaw who lives in a human house.

Geraldine Snell

Title: Dancing Year: 2020 Country: UK Medium: Moving Image (digital video, 4’) Status: World Festival Premiere Title: Still Life Moving Year: 2020 Country: UK Medium: Moving Image (digital video, 8’) Status: World Festival Premiere Contact: geraldine-snell@live.co.uk Website: geraldinesnell.com instagram.com/geraldinesnell facebook.com/geraldine.snell Geraldine Snell’s Dancing is a home video playfully capturing a moment of sublime sunlight shining onto a flaking living room wall. One fixed shot documents the shadows of a door being abruptly opened, the artist’s hand dancing in the stream of the sunlight cast upon the wall, her figure moving across the frame, and the door being closed again. Made at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, it became the first in a series of works titled Light & Love, focused on careful observation of immediate and ephemeral phenomena.

Still Life Moving, shot in April 2020 and from the same series, shows the artist and her housemate marvelling at the beautiful colours that sunlight casts through various coloured drinking glasses on their kitchen counter.

These works were originally shared on social media to provide a soft, haptic counterpoint to the quick, slick imagery we are subjected to in digital space, in unconditional eternal testimony to the sublimely mundane.

Duncan Marquiss is a Glasgow-based artist who makes films, drawings and music. His work often looks at overlaps between the cultural and the biological. Marquiss was the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2015-16. He is currently developing a new documentary with LUX, exploring connections between ethology and AI.

Geraldine Snell (b. 1992, Keighley, based in London) uses moving image, performance, music and the word to navigate being with humour, nuance and awe. Recent highlights include appearances at CIRCA 2020: Piccadilly Lights, London Grads Now – Saatchi Gallery, solo exhibition self help – Eston Arts Centre, and London Short Film Festival.

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Heesoo Kwon

Julie Ramage

Title: A Ritual for Metamorphosis / Year: 2019 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (digital video, 12’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: heesooclass@gmail.com Website: heesookwon.com

Title: How to order online Year: 2021 Country: France Medium: Moving Image (digital video, 9’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: contact@julieramage.com Website: julieramage.com

Title: Premolt Year: 2019 Country: USA Medium: Photo (digital prints installation) Status: International Premiere

With inmates submitted to occasional and monitored phone calls, no internet connection and complete restriction of economic transactions, French prisons are dead zones in the heart of lively cities. To overcome this situation, they developed their own exchange infrastructure, a mechanical network of handmade tools (called yo-yos) which allow for the circulation of goods and messages. In a collaboratively-produced work, French artist Julie Ramage speaks with inmates who reveal the development, craftsmanship and ingenuity which they have adapted in response to the constantly evolving architectural and legal landscapes of the penitentiary. In essence, the yo-yos act as a ‘mechanical intranet’, allowing the prison population to ‘order online’. They symbolize the power dynamics within prisons while also confirming the universal human need for exchange. The film’s soundtrack consists of recordings of inmates using tools to engage in geophysical prospecting of the soil underneath the prison in Poissy. These were transformed into soundwaves, allowing us to get an aural impression of the prison’s secret telecommunication network from out of the soil below.

Heesoo Kwon’s A Ritual for Metamorphosis ( ) is a video in which the artist attempts to re-frame her traumatic personal experiences through creating an alternate reality. Kwon imagines virtual space as a utopian realm where one can reimagine and revisualise the past. Through the body of a nude 3D avatar, she travels back to her childhood home, stepping inside home video taken by her father at family gatherings long ago. There she faces patriarchal family rituals and coercive religious rituals that she didn’t notice when she was young, and interrupts them with her avatar. On the soundtrack, we hear the repetitive rhythm of traditional ironing sticks hitting stone, used both as a metaphor for the invisible labour of Korean women, and as a sound of healing and catharsis. Shown alongside the video, Kwon’s photographic series Premolt similarly inserts digital avatars of herself and her familiar women ancestors into domestic photographs from when she was young, another humorous and uncanny metamorphosis.

Heesoo Kwon is a visual artist and anthropologist from South Korea and is currently based in California. Kwon initiated Leymusoon, an autobiographical feminist religion, in 2017. The Leymusoom project mines the depths of personal cosmologies and Korean shamanism to sculpt a virtual confessional space of deep introspection.

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Julie Ramage (1987, France) is a visual artist and holds a PhD degree in humanities and arts. She investigates the complex relationships between people and the spaces they occupy. Since 2015, she has worked with the Bétonsalon Center for art & research with whom she launched the Co-Workers prison art and research platform.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Sam Smith

Title: E.1027 Year: 2016-21 Country: Australia/UK Medium: Performance (double projection, moving image, sound, 45’) Contact: studio@samsmith.net.au Website: samsmith.net.au @smsmth (Instagram) E.1027 is a performance based on the complex history and imagined future of Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray’s eponymous villa. A history of conflict, etched within the building’s material structure, plays out in episodes of companionship, obsession, murder and destruction. The work actively seeks to diminish the importance of Le Corbusier within this narrative, whose obsessive relationship with Gray’s villa is encaptured in his vandalistic murals that were painted directly onto the walls of the house. A skillful editor and montagist, Sam Smith here combines moving images, sound and archival documents through multi-channel projection from a laptop. One of the artist’s signature desktop performances – utilising the structure and mechanics of personal computers to synthesise and display works in as an aural-visual collage – E.1027 gives resonance and voice to Gray’s one-time home as an entity capable of reorganising matter, facilitating life and playing a central part in its own narrative.

Sam Smith is an artist and filmmaker whose work brings documentary and archival content in contact with speculative narratives to render connective charges between geological formations, architectural apertures, (cinematic) histories and paranormal entities. Previous presentations include International Film Festival Rotterdam, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Australian Centre for Moving Image, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin among others.

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Séamus Harahan

Title: There’s A Weight On You But You Can’t Feel It Year: 2008-18 Country: Northern Ireland Medium: Moving Image (DVpal and Hi8-to-digital, 12’) Status: World Premiere Contact: LUX Website: vimeo.com/citygas There’s A Weight On You But You Can’t Feel It is a new collection of short films made between 2008 and 2018

by Séamus Harahan. While Harahan’s films have taken a number of different forms, this grouping focuses on his observational documentaries, recorded on video cameras shooting through the windows of various places he lived in North Belfast. The films capture found activity, natural and built environments, the animal world and human unpredictability. The visual layer of the films are then married to new (primarily musical) soundtracks which serve to dislocate the films from the realm of pure recording to something more complex and ambiguous, the intersection of inner and outer realities. While this construction might become repetitive or rote in less capable hands, Harahan wrings from the images and sounds a range of unexpected emotions. Watching this collection of films, a viewer can’t help but contemplate the beauty, hilarity, strangeness and wonder that they might witness if they too patiently observed out of the windows of their own homes.

Séamus Harahan is an artist and experimental filmmaker from Northern Ireland. His films – which take the form of experimental documentary – examine place, the act of looking and the action of recording before thought, often documenting found activity or mapping emotional and intellectual spaces.

Arts Programme

Sophie Michael

Title: Rabbit Hole Year: 2021 Country: UK Medium: Moving Image (HD video with sound, 4’) Status: Joint World Premiere with The Rectory Projects Contact: info@sophiemichael.co.uk Website: seventeengallery.com/artists/sophie-michael/ “Yes, a white wardrobe can be a rabbit hole. That’s definitely unusual!” Sophie Michael’s new moving image work finds its unique meeting point in the connection of proto-cinematic, abstract experiments with the development of early years speech in children. As such, Rabbit Hole centres on two distinct perceptual phenomena that are magical and seemingly beyond rational explanation. The images are made up of collages on sugar paper which reproduce chromatropes, abstract colour slides used during the pre-cinema Magic Lantern shows of the late 19th century. As these colourful, geometric collages spin and create hypnotic patterns, we hear the voice of a young child (the artist’s three year old son) talking in solitude, testing out new combinations of words to depict a high place in the room on which origami rabbits sit. His words are shown on-screen, at the centre of swirling, mandala-like patterns, lending associations between this grasping for language, the wonder of proto-cinematic spectacles, and the psychedelic-era experimental films of artists like Jordan Belson, James Whitney and Hy Hirsch, made in the 1950s and 60s.

Wanja Kimani

Title: borrowed intimacy Year: 2013 Country: UK Medium: Mixed Media (embroidery and print on cotton dill) Contact: wanjakimani@gmail.com Website: wanjakimani.co.uk Wanja Kimani’s borrowed intimacy series looks at the process of assimilation into a new surrounding; the act of engaging and creating a new place to belong whilst still holding on to the memory of the previous place. Taking her own experience, Kimani looked back at the conscious and subconscious processes that led her to see England as her home. An embroidered text sits on white cotton dill, with a print of an image repeated from one to the next, with material and image consistently fading like a tenuous memory.

In the text, the object of the artist’s affection is her memory of home and the realisation that she left this home behind. The place has moved on and changed; her memories of this home are not necessarily its current reality. If the past is a foriegn country, borrowed intimacy is an elegant map of the journey Kimani has taken from there, its complex emotion beautifully conveyed through word and material.

Through performance, film, textiles and installation, Wanja Kimani’s work explores memory through the body and the fluidity within social structures that are designed to care and protect, but mutate into coercive forces within society. She imposes elements of her own life into public spaces, creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character.

Sophie Michael (b.1985, London) works with moving image to examine the staging of nostalgia and innocence. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at galleries, museums and festivals including Toronto International Film Festival (2016, 2011) and Tate Britain where she presented a solo exhibition as part of the Art Now series (2016). Michael is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London.

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La Zone

Georges Lacombe / 1928 / France / 30’ / French intertitles with English audio translation, silent film with recorded music La Zone: au pays des chiffonniers is a silent documentary which was the first film of Georges Lacombe.

Starting as an assistant director to René Clair on films like Entr’acte (1924), Lacombe would initiate his directorial career with this avant-garde work that is distinct from the rest of his filmography. Produced with activist motivations, La Zone shows life “in the land of the ragpickers” (the film’s subtitle), the outskirts of Paris where urban poor live in caravans, hastily-built cabins and among dire conditions. A precursor to other whistleblower documentaries like Luis Buñuel’s Land Without Bread (1933) and Lee Dick’s Men and Dust (1940), La Zone documents the beauty and tragedy of life quite literally on the fringe, a zone that circled the periphery of Paris and which would later be demolished to make way for the Boulevard Périphérique. Though this area no longer exists, the harsh conditions depicted in La Zone are still common across the world today.

La Zone will be screened in 35mm with recorded music and translated French intertitles.

Print courtesy IFCinema, Institut Français.

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Tabita Rezaire, Mamelles Ancestrales, 2019

Right on Time

Location: Online Exhibitions Platform “Memory, like light, wraps itself around all objects in a room. Each object and item is recording the spacetime event from its own perspective. In order to reconstruct a space-time event, you would have to get the memory from each object to build up the scene.

Like a scavenger hunt.”

Right on Time, is a group exhibition that highlights the voices of artists who do not necessarily adhere to the traditional definition of ‘time’ and ‘temporality’ in their narratives. Their works offer new paths of possibilities, and evoke, both through their subjects and visuals, a structure which merges past, present, future and beyond. Thus, Right on Time unfolds as a collective, open-ended encounter with time(s).

— Rasheedah Phillips, Recurrence Plot.

— Soukaina Aboulaoula, Curator

Inspired by this quote from Rasheedah Phillips, I invite you to consider this group exhibition as a scavenger hunt, where you will be called to explore different historical and personal experiences/memories. This is not about reconstructing these events or reliving them, but more about creating a collective time-space to explore the layers of our relationship(s) with time and the many ways in which it can be felt. Featuring works of moving image, performance and sound,

Artists: Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox (HUNITI GOLDOX), Ash Moniz. Gian Spina, Lina Laraki, Mohammad Shawky Hassan, Mona Benyamin, Pallavi Paul, The School of Mutants, Tabita Rezaire, Zara Zandieh

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Unfinished ruminations in progress: On time, memories, archives, the not-yet, the pause, the interstice

An Essay by Chahrazad Zahi

Ancient Greeks had a talent for creating words that enclosed complex and nuanced meanings, and that are essentially hard to translate. Hypomnema is one of those words. It’s a combination of a personal diary and a research notebook, a material memory of things read or thought, and a personal treasure. A collection of fragmented thoughts that reveals what’s important, for rereading and later meditation, when time elapses and life interferes with its constant stream of large and small dilemmas. “ (...) Keeping kinds of notebooks on important subjects (what the Greeks call ‘hypomnemata’), (...) must be reread from time to time so as to re-actualize their contents.” (Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982). Since April 2020, the author has inked out a couple of hypomnemata,where she reflected on her work as an art historian in training, her personal life, positionality, and many discussions with Right on Time curator Soukaina Aboulaoula. This text contains many excerpts of her pandemic streams of thought/notebooks entries.

It’s day 294930413 since the beginning of the time of time or empty time. Time is a recurrent issue in metaphysical philosophy, along with substance, being, life and death. Few thinkers have made it a central theme, because of the elusiveness of being in time, its abstraction. It is the “unthinkable in thought”.

Deleuze talks about the empty time in Difference and Repetition, calling it an “Aeon.” A time in which nothing happens but time itself. The empty time is when radical eventality is possible, the time of the work of art. A time that exceeds the general chronic temporality, a time full of itself, in the expectation of a yet unknown outcome.

The empty time leads me to flatten out, densify and condense some unprocessed life experience, memories that were floating in the waiting room of my brain. In the empty time, streams of ruminations are inescapable. I find refuge in semi-philosophical detours, attempting to understand my positionality, latched between the two current worlds I am rooted in, through normal everyday existence and the prerequisites of my research. In the empty time, I find myself working through the brain fog. This mental archival work, of contesting and surviving memories, brings me to think about my life-long fascination with the archive, long before I stepped into the realm of scholarly conversations.

What does it mean to be an art historian? History is posed as the story of the victorious and the literate, whereas memory is the democratic survival of oral traditions, folklore, and material culture. This binary occludes the realisation that history itself is an ‘art of memory’, the art of the archive, one that presents conscious ‘recollections’ of the past and calls them into the present day. This is the interstice that I inhabit. The art of memory, the art of archiving. Working

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April, 202[0]1 –

within the time-space of the archive, “this space that is neither past nor present: at once close to us, and different from our present existence. It is the border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 130). Foucault further suggests that the archive both sustains and disrupts patterns of temporal and historical ordering. Archive contents are not “inscribed in an unbroken linearity” – but they also do not simply “disappear at the mercy of chance.”

The archive’s location is both discursive and temporal: “the locus of the archive is the gap between our discursive practices…it deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 148). Pierre Nora talks about it in Les lieux de mémoire (59). When he said: “Our whole society lives for archival production”, I felt it in my bones.

But how to flatten this out, condense, densify, push these forms into an annotated text that is written, maybe read? The archival work distills a period of time, a person’s timeline into pages, word documents, databases, files, boxes, shelves – a tangible bibliography. The gaps in the story fuel the imagination as one steps into and out of the box, [the record of] a person’s life, this archival surrogate. The temporal spills into the discursive, in this oddity of a space. Different temporalities and historiographic shapes emerge. (Note-to-self: Being an art historian is a strange space to inhabit when one suffers from time-blindness.)

Archives are usually considered as a site of power, and researchers tend to focus on its potential impact on history and practices of knowledge-making more generally. I understand the need for this archeology of knowledge, but I have always been drawn to rhizomic, informal histories, that “ramify like weeds” through mutations of connection and disconnection, continuity and disruption. Working with an eclectic amalgam of weeds, objects, text, images, space, time and people. Playing different roles: maker, organizer, historian, detective, curator. When re-imagined and re-written histories are inserted back into the archive to become part of its positive contents, archive, history, and knowledge are reshaped recursively, remodeling ideas of temporality itself. Time, history, and archive fold back and re-digest themselves, yielding new mutations, new patterns.

This is how research makes sense to me. An archival impulse, an urgency that attaches to the recuperation of neglected archives, to the ‘reparation’ of a lost history, a skewed narrative, and to questioning and rethinking the historicizing impulse itself.

The modeling of novel methods of archiving and history-making is at least as critical as reclaiming lost, future, present pasts that are ‘hidden from history’. “What has not entered the historical records, and what is not yet culturally legible, is of-

ten encountered in embodied, non-rational forms: as ghosts, scars, gods” (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 104). The non-rational forms of the archive make it, above all, a prerogative of the artist. This is what Jalal Toufic argues for, when he talks about the recursivity of time and explains the duty of the artists that live in space-time oddities (war, disasters) to chase and enliven what cannot enter the historical record, what is lost in time: “We live in a block universe of space-time, where nothing physically passes and vanishes, but where occasionally things withdraw due to surpassing disasters. After the surpassing disaster, the duty of an artist is either to ‘resurrect what has been withdrawn’ or to ‘disclose the withdrawal’.”

The artists of Right on Time are in the conceptual encounter between the archive and its temporalities, resurrecting the withdrawn and disclosing the withdrawal. Their work attaches to liminal histories, to the disruptive, the fragmented, the lost in time, and exceeds an archaeology or excavation of the past. They excavate ghosts, scars, gods, and turn these excavation sites into construction sites, proposing new affective spaces. They construct new narratives and new identity formations; and while it retains a melancholic dimension, it also proposes new affective orders and, in fact, positions feeling and affectivity central at the core of their work. They offer a rich array of figures for the powerful untimeliness of alterity – the coincidence, the specter, the not-yet, the pause, the interstice.

By bending temporalities, folding, unfolding them, the artists of Right on Time underscore that they have no responsibility to ‘commemorate’ their archive subjects, or to create a memorial. They depart from pre-formed or conventional emotional responses, and steer their work toward their own more personal and sometimes complicated feelings toward and about these timelines. Right on Time artworks are imbued with reparative readings of time – but not simply so. Their work may be dark and obscure, half-hidden, coded and cryptic, or reflected and indirect. Some works emerge as more fully-formed narratives, albeit as alter/counter-narratives or poetic accounts that could be read alongside the imagined lives they brought to life. In all cases, a resistance to linear narratives and straight timelines seems to prevail, propelling the present into a heightened space-time oddity, an affect-laden space of much needed reflection.

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Bibliography and co-authors

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1994.

Hal Foster, An Archival impulse, 2004 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 1969 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982 Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 1997 Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, 1989 Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster, 2009

Bio: Chahrazad Zahi was an independent curator before entering Boston University as a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture. Her research areas include Art and Politics in Postcolonial Africa and Decentering the Avant-Garde, where she focuses on different responses to Avant-Garde aesthetics in regions traditionally depicted as cultural, geographical and linguistic peripheries.

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Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox (HUNITI GOLDOX)

Title: The DIDO Problem Year: 2021 Country: Tunisia Medium: Moving Image, Sound (video, 30’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: elizagoldox@gmail.com Website: elizagoldox.com, areejhuniti.com Huniti Goldox’s The DIDO Problem is a film and public intervention project presented within the framework of this exhibition as an online screening and an audio piece. The work entangles geopolitical realities and mythological continuities. The starting point is re-imagining the Greek myth of Dido and her resistance towards oppression and territory. Through digital and material reenactments, the film touches on the notion of enforced mutation and historical fabrication of diverse bodies of water, land and people. By following water histories and cycles, The DIDO Problem attends to the complex circulation of matter and desire and how it gets mutated by exploitation. The film will be accompanied by a sound piece that will give more insight on the piece, the collaboration between Areej and Eliza, and their research process.

Producer: L’art Rue / Dream City

Ash Moniz

Title: Joules Year: 2021 Country: Egypt Medium: Moving Image (film, 11’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: ashmoniz@gmail.com Joules is a project based around the court testimony from Elizabeth Forrester (a witness in the 1798 Wapping Coal Riots in London) who claimed that a police officer shot two people with one bullet (one rioter and one police officer). This moment took place within the opening of the Thames River police unit (known as the advent of preventive policing), a department of a shipping company (West India Committee) commissioned to prevent loss in their inventory. The film performs a motion-study of the ‘double-shot’ that Forrester witnessed, through studying the motion of property title, as a trajectory of exchange. The physics of ‘Work’ (Force x Distance), frames the historical moment in which a wage per time unit was introduced by the Thames River Police, to replace the dock-workers’ traditional wage system. Based on the police archives, it looks at the indexicality formed between ‘loss’ and ‘criminality’. Through looking at negative space (the possible undead history that Forrester claimed), the film crystallises the material history of criminalising supply-chain workers, within a dramaturgy that unpacks the interweaving of historical, cinematic, and logistical conceptions of lost time.

HUNITI GOLDOX is a German-Jordanian artist duo based between Leipzig and Amman. In their joint practice they use new media technologies, video art and writing to develop spaces and tools for collective imagining. Their thematic focus is water, mythology and engagement with other natural elements, as a way to tell stories over liquid, dry and non-material matter.

Ash Moniz is a Cairo-based artist working around the modes of representability within the securitization of supply-chain logistics. Moniz exhibited at Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), Sishang Museum (Beijing), Forum Expanded | Berlinale, the Dakar Biennale, among others. Moniz is a fellow at Künstlerhaus Buchsenhausen (Innsbruck), and the Maritime Portal Residency (Times Museum Guangzhou, online).

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Gian Spina

Title: On Time Year: 2016 Country: Brazil/Palestine Medium: Moving Image (video, 16’) Status: World Premiere Contact: gianspina@gmail.com Website: gianspina.com On Time is a film-essay structured as an extended reflection on the usage and perception of time and memory. Drawing from works by different writers, it opens up the questions of how we use time, how the simple idea of counting the days changes our perception of life, and how a fast pace influences how we remember. Departing from a wish to look back at the 2016 coup d’etat in Brazil, the film arrives at how speed and memory bind in our societies. Composed with photos and videos made over the last 10 years, the images repeat themselves overlapped with silence, a black screen, and poetry.

Born in São Paulo, Brazil, Gian Spina is a writer, researcher and artist based in Cairo. Gian has worked and taught in pedagogical experiments at International Art Academy Palestine, Escola da Cidade (São Paulo), the Ionion Center for Arts and Culture (Greece) as well as CILAS (Cairo).

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Lina Laraki

Title: The Last Observer Year: 2020 Country: Belgium Medium: Moving Image (digital and Super 8, 11’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: lina.laraki@gmail.com Website: linalaraki.com Post-human, Post-plant, Post-nature, Post-memory, Post-everything! The Last Observer is a film from beyond the future and the past merged together.

We are talking about a new world in which plants and technology dominate, where we can finally know what a plant has to say. After all human life has disappeared from Earth, a bored artificial intuition connects to non-human life. A plant is having a recurring dream about a ‘last observer’ and recounts this strange dream in a dystopian narrative.

All the components of the film take us on a journey through time. The pairing of the images of a speculative future shot with super 8, a format from the past, creates a contemplative and rather endearing environment that throws us directly into reflections around artificial intelligence, anthropocentrism, and self projections.

Lina Laraki lives and works between France and Morocco and pursues a multidisciplinary artistic practice and works in parallel as an assistant director, producer and editor. Her research is eclectic and ranges from the occult to quantum physics, magical realism to the treatment of time through film.

Arts Programme

Mohammad Shawky Hassan

Title: And On a Different Note Year: 2015 Country: Egypt Medium: Moving Image (video, 24’) Contact: m.shawky.hassan@gmail.com Website: facebook.com/mohammadshawky twitter.com/MohammadShawky instagram.com/mshawkyhassan And on a Different Note is a navigation of an attempt to carve out a personal space amid an inescapable sonic shield created primarily by prime-time political talk shows with their indistinguishable, absurd and at times undecipherable rhetoric/noises. Equally repulsive and addictive, these noises travel across geographies gradually constituting an integral part of a self-created map of exile. Artist’s statement: “Today in this house nothing happens, nor does it in the homes of others. Time and place stand on parallel lines, refuting the coordinates of existence. The chronology of events is obscured, subversive noise is obliterated, elucidation impossible and language futile. All that remains is a sound-scape perpetually occupied by self-proclaimed patriots, and scattered spaces carved by the rhythm of everyday life, all conspiring to maintain the status quo while hiding the humming back-ground noise of the world.”

Director: Mohammad Shawky Hassan Editor: Louly Seif Cinematography: Michael Kennedy Sound: Louly Seif, Mohammad Shawky Hassan

Mona Benyamin

Title: Moonscape Year: 2020 Country: Palestine Medium: Moving Image (video, 17’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: bin_mona@hotmail.com Website: monabenyamin.com Moonscape is a short film which takes the form of a music video for a ballad/middle-of-the-road song, performed in Arabic as a duet between a male and female singer. The song makes a connection between the artist, a young Palestinian woman living under Israeli occupation, longing to end the misery of her people in any way possible, and Dennis M. Hope, a man who claimed ownership of the moon in 1980 and founded the Lunar Embassy, a company that sells land on a variety of planets and moons. The visuals of the film are a hybrid of surrealist scenes from the Arab music industry, reenacted by the artist’s parents who play the roles of the singers in the film, and film noir; found footage from the NASA archives; references from canonic films which influenced the art world and show representations of the moon, and screenshots of email correspondences with staff members from the Lunar Embassy. The film serves to explore the relationship between hope, nostalgia and despair.

Mona Benyamin (b.1997, Haifa) is a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker, she obtained her BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, in 2020. In her works, she explores intergenerational outlooks on hope, trauma and questions of identity, using humor and irony as political tools of resistance and reflection.

Mohammad Shawky Hassan is a filmmaker and video artist living and working between Cairo and Berlin.

His films include It Was Related to Me (2011), On a Day like Today (2012), Compos Mentis (2016) and And on a Different Note (2015), which was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of its permanent collection.

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Pallavi Paul

Title: The Blind Rabbit Year: 2020 Country: India Medium: Moving Image (HD Video, 43’) Status: UK premiere Contact: paul.pallavi@gmail.com

Pallavi Paul brings stories to the screen that have been told but never institutionalized, often silenced/ denied or swept under the rug – for lack of evidence, and accountability. The Blind Rabbit is an attempt to create a narrative from the memories and stories of collective power, resistance, and violence by using image as a tool for representation and production of a new kind of political acumen. The film moves across moments like the national emergency of 1975 - 77, and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, all while remaining anchored in the contemporary by recalling the recent police brutality across university campuses. These emergency times are evidently connected by the repression they serve, but what makes them interwoven across the historical timeforms is the structures behind which fuel the power to keep producing citizens as terrorized subjects.

The Blind Rabbit alternates between archive footage, text, images shot by the director, and photos to sculpt a space of reflection around all these questions.

Pallavi Paul works with video, performance, and installation. Her practice speaks to poetic exploration of cultural histories, questioning the limits of speculation and facticity and evidence. Paul is also engaged in thinking about ideas of the archive, tensions between document and documentary and the implication of trace within these openings. She has received her PhD in Film Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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The School of Mutants

Title: The School of Mutants Year: 2020 Country: Senegal/France/Taiwan Medium: Moving Image (HD video, sound, 12’) Status: UK Premiere Contact: hamedine.kane@gmail.com verletbottero@gmail.com The three-channel video installation The School of Mutants stages a radio interview in a fictional and uncertain time. Two characters talk about how to inhabit the territory. Their discussion seems to resonate with the landscape of brutalist and industrial ruins that surrounds them. A tension arises, between doubts and questions about their vision of the future.

In contrast to the fatalism of one, the other argues that the ruins are a shelter for organising a common life and breaking the cycle of political disillusionment.

Oscillating between cinema of the real and futuristic speculation, the work leads us into a poetic and political reflection on the mutations of the world. The School of Mutants is part of long-term research that artists Hamedine Kane and Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro have been conducting since 2018 around projects for alternative schools and universities conceived after Senegal’s independence.

Hamedine Kane is a Senegalese and Mauritanian artist and director. His film The Blue House, which had its world premiere at IDFA in Amsterdam in November 2020, received a special mention from the jury.

Stéphane Verlet-Bottéro is an artist, ecologist, and curator. He has had exhibitions and collaborations with international institutions such as ZKM Museum (Karlsruhe), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Technê Institute (Buffalo), Science Museum (London), documenta 13 (Kassel).

Arts Programme

Tabita Rezaire

Zara Zandieh

Title: Mamelles Ancestrales Year: 2019 Country: Senegal/Gambia Medium: (Moving Image (digital, 61’) Status: UK premiere Contact: olivia@goodman-gallery.com Website: tabitarezaire.com

Title: Octavia’s Visions Year: 2021 Country: Germany Medium: Moving Image (UHD digital, 18’) Status: International Premiere Contact: contact@zarazandieh.com Website: zarazandieh.com

Drawing inspiration from the megalithic landscapes of Senegal and the Gambia, space debris, archaeology, astronomy, numerology, theology and African understandings of the cosmos, Mamelles Ancestrales strives to establish pathways between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead, in a world where celestial bodies, mineral life and spirits sing together. The film is the result of Tabita Rezaire’s research and expeditions to four megalithic sites. Gathering stories from the guardians of the sites, local populations and other understandings from astronomers, archeologists, and theologians to unfold the mysteries of the thousands of stone circles scattered across Senegambia, Mamelles Ancestrales goes in pursuit of an ancient African megalithic civilization so as to better understand our own.

In the mid-1990s, the African-American visionary author, Octavia E. Butler, published two novels later to be called the ‘Parable Series’. In ‘Parable of the Sower’ and ‘Parable of the Talents’, Butler tells the story of a community struggling to survive the environmental, socioeconomic and political collapse of 21st century USA. Butler, who died in 2006, created characters and worlds that remain highly topical today. Her complex characters are genderfluid time travelers, atrocity survivors, Black Women and People of Colour. Inspired by the Parables, Octavia’s Visions speaks to contemporary themes of environmental degradation, far-right extremism, and social liberation. The poetic piece expresses a queer utopian imaginary, a longing to create out of the old something new.

Tabita Rezaire is infinity longing to experience itself in human form. Her path as an artist, devotee, yogi, doula, and soon to be farmer is all geared towards manifesting the divine in herself and beyond. Tabita finds expression in her cross-dimensional practices which explore the possibilities of decolonial healing through technology.

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Zara Zandieh (they/she) is a Berlin-based filmmaker whose works have been screened and nominated at various film festivals. The stories told through Zara‘s projects are dedicated to a decolonial queer gaze that weaves complexities and multi-layered representations of post-migrant and marginalized subjects into poetic narratives.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Emily Chao, No Land, 2019

Dialogues: Emily Chao and Al Wong Location: Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab, Online Exhibition Platform

This exhibition is a double retrospective of artists Emily Chao and Al Wong. The ‘dialogues’ their work is being placed in are curatorial in nature: these are two artists who have not met or collaborated, and who were not aware of each other’s work previously.

The intention is not only to highlight both of their practices individually, but also that showing their work together would allow other elements to emerge beyond simply highlighting similarities or resonances between their practices.

Indeed, there are similarities and differences, which could be a good place to set some coordinates.

Chao and Wong are both Asian American artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and they both have practices that in some way include highly individual takes on ‘experimental film’. They both have a keen eye for visual communication beyond language and

they both have invested a significant amount of time and thought in working with 16mm celluloid film as a material, probing its capabilities and limitations.

The biggest difference is the most obvious one: Al Wong’s artistic practice stretches back more than fifty years to the 1960s – one of his first exhibitions was at Expo ’67 in Montreal, representing the United States in a showing of “films by young people.”

While Wong has honed his practice across the better half of a century, Emily Chao’s filmmaking practice has developed only since 2015. She has developed a small but strong body of short-form non-fiction films which points toward exciting work on the horizon.

This is where the dialogues come in: what can we learn from placing the works of artists from across different generations in conversation? It’s hard to have an answer for this before the exhibition, but

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it’s hoped that this unexpected effect will emerge from the conversations which will be held not only between these artists but also through their works.

‘Dialogues: Emily Chao and Al Wong’ is conceived as a series that crosses the three areas of Sheffield DocFest’s programme: exhibition, film screening and talk. In addition to the exhibition at Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab – where three short films by Emily Chao will be installed alongside Al Wong’s Same Difference – there will be a screening as part of the festival’s Ghosts & Apparitions strand.

This screening pairs together Emily Chao’s short documentary Bruce Takes Dragon Town (2015) with a screening of Al Wong’s Twin Peaks (1977), shown in a new 16mm restoration print by the Pacific Film Archive, who funded the restoration through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.

In addition, the festival will host a talk between Emily Chao and Al Wong, where they will meet for the first time and discuss their own practices and approaches, and, significantly, exchange around each other’s work.

It is our hope that these conversations between the artists and their work will continue beyond the realm of this festival. And it’s Sheffield DocFest’s intention to keep the form of ‘Dialogues’ as a series, a way of developing cross-generational exchange between artists, with hopes to develop new perspectives as well as unexpected and exciting conversations.

Al Wong

Al Wong’s Same Difference was composed over the course of a year with a 16mm camera set up on a tripod in the artist’s kitchen capturing views of the San Francisco hills through a large double window.

Artist Ursula Schneider sits on a chair underneath the window, her presence and stillness an essential part of the work. With Schneider’s body in the centre of the frame, Wong shot freely at different times of day and night, cloudy or empty skies, and experimented with in-camera effects and editing to compose complicated choreographies of light, clouds and atmosphere. The soundtrack of Same Difference is a drone composition recorded by artist Terry Fox, expressing the depth and immensity of the film’s visuals. The process of shooting Same Difference directly informed Al Wong’s long-form structural film Twin Peaks, produced two years later as a further development of the window motif. Viewing Same Difference is a hypnotic, meditative experience, as well as a metaphor for the endless cycles at the centre of Zen Buddhist philosophy.

Title: Same Difference Year: 1975 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (16mm-to-digital, 17 mins) Status: International Premiere Contact: redfan94103@yahoo.com Website: alwongart.com

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— Herb Shellenberger, Curator

Al Wong is a San Francisco-based artist who has worked in film, installation, performance and mixed media since the 1960s. Wong’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his expanded cinema performance Light & Shadow in 1986.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Emily Chao

Title: As Long As There is Breath Year: 2020 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (16mm-to-digital, 2 mins) Status: UK Premiere Contact: chao.emily@gmail.com Website: nolandfilms.com Title: No Land Year: 2019 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (16mm-to-digital, 2 mins) Status: UK Premiere

Since 2015, filmmaker and curator Emily Chao has developed a distinctive series of non-fiction moving image works from which ideas, subjects and expressions overflow beyond their short running times.

Invested in the materiality and process of analogue filmmaking, Chao often shoots on 16mm film and is a member of two collectives based around celluloid film exhibition (Light Field) and lab-based production (Black Hole Collective Film Lab). Her films variously focus on identity and diaspora, history and representation, and the interaction between space and memory. With a developing body of work that is consistently blooming with new ideas, this exhibition focuses on three of Chao’s films which were shot on 16mm. As Long As There is Breath is a short cine-poem which ruminates on the interaction between inner and outer space from the context of the COVID-19 lockdown in Northern California; No Land is a self-processed film that expresses an enigmatic interplay between nature and technology; and chive pockets is a film documenting Chao’s grandmother making the titular dish for the last time.

Emily Chao is a filmmaker and independent curator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a co-programmer of Light Field, an international exhibition of experimental cinema, and a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab. Her work has shown at festivals and institutions including Viennale, Pacific Film Archive, CROSSROADS (SF Cinematheque), San Diego Asian Film Festival and REDCAT.

Title: chive pockets Year: 2017 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (16mm-to-digital, 3 mins) Status: UK Premiere

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Commissions

Alex Tyson

Title: The Registry Year: 2021 Country: USA Medium: Moving Image (two-channel installation, 30’) Status: World Premiere Contact: alextyson@gmail.com Website: alextyson.net

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The Registry is a new moving image installation by Los Angeles-based artist and independent filmmaker Alex Tyson, commissioned by Sheffield DocFest. An evolution from his past works of formally innovative documentary film, The Registry is the artist’s first narrative work, an elliptical, layered psychological horror that brings together multiple storylines which intersect in complex ways. Embedded within these narrative threads are topics salient to the documentary/non-fiction field: the afterlives of images of war and their fictional representation; the potential tokenisation of subjects, stories, and makers by the industry; and the ethical dilemmas arising from the commercialisation of the stock image/footage market. These topics are related subtly through Tyson’s own cinematography, editing, and sound design – always unconventional and off-kilter – and through the juxtaposition of the film’s looped projection with an additional projection of documentary footage referenced in the film’s narrative.

Alex Tyson is an independent filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. His work has screened at international festivals including Art of The Real, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and Visions du Réel. He has worked as a cinematographer internationally, including the US, Brazil, China, the South Pacific, Europe and Central Africa, and has contributed to Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentaries which are distributed widely.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Charlotte Jarvis

Title: In Posse Year: 2021 Country: UK Medium: Installation, Mixed Media (‘female’ semen, altar, laboratory equipment, feasting table with ritual objects, video, 46’) Status: World Premiere Contact: info@cjarvis.com Website: cjarvis.com In Posse is a new installation by artist Charlotte Jarvis that documents a quest she took to make semen from ‘female’ cells. The work engages with semen as a revered magical substance, a totem of literal and symbolic potency, and aims to use art and science to disrupt the patriarchy. While developing this multifaceted work across multiple years, countries, collaborations, Jarvis has been pregnant, experienced labour and become a mother. This iteration of the work is Jarvis’ attempt to reconcile these experiences with the process of making the project. It is also a manifesto of sorts, and a review of where the project stands in multiple senses: creatively, scientifically, ethically and personally.

Commissioned by Sheffield DocFest in partnership with Site Gallery, this new multi-channel video installation of In Posse represents a new form for the work. In Posse will world premiere at Site Gallery, accompanied by a cinema presentation and a contemporary festival of Thesmophoria, a collaborative reimagining of the mysterious, ritualistic ancient Greek women-only event. In Posse was produced in collaboration with Dr. Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes (Leiden University Medical Center), Kapelica Gallery/ Kersnikova Institute (Ljubljana), MU Hybrid Art House (Eindhoven) and NESTA.

Right on Time Radio

Drawing by Aziza Ahmad Courtesy of AWU Radio.

Right on Time Radio is a temporary web radio station, which will air daily in Sheffield DocFest’s online exhibitions platform during the festival days. Carried by the voices of sound artists, curators, researchers and radio & podcast collectives. This radio station features new works commissioned by Sheffield DocFest, including sound performance, discussions, contemporary literature, reflections and sound experimentations.

Throughout the waves of this radio station, the contributors have a carte blanche to share a glimpse of their practices, and some of the questions they raise in their work and research. Thus, not only inviting us to reflect further on some of the questions outlined in the Right on Time exhibition, but also offering the opportunity to shift from the visual dimensions of the exhibition into a space of collective listening.

Right on Time Radio aims to initiate conversations, and to establish a platform of companionship which offers an alternative way of being and spending time ‘together’.

Contributors: AWU Radio, Himali Singh Soin, Karim Kattan & Yasmine Benabdallah, Les Bonnes Ondes feat. Layal Rhanem, micro.radio, Yasmina Reggad

Charlotte Jarvis is an artist working at the intersection of art and science. Her practice often utilises living cells and DNA, and she makes large-scale multimedia installations and performances for international exhibitions. She has been a resident artist at the European Bioinformatics Institute, British Council in Argentina and the Hubrecht Institute, and is currently a lecturer at Royal College of Art. 207

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DocFest Exchange: Beyond Our Own Eyes Whether you view Earth from outer space or through a microscope you will discover diverse, interconnected, and interdependent life.

For astronauts, this is called the overview effect. Looking down on Earth in Marc Bauder’s Who We Were, astronaut Alexander Gerst is struck by how fragile and connected our planet is. From afar, borders become invisible. The history of humans is a tiny brief episode; a ball of life protected by a paper-thin atmosphere.

When evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis studies the microscopic world of bacteria, she sees symbiogenesis. In John Feldman’s Symbiotic Earth we hear her revolutionary theory that life did not evolve simply through competition and random genetic mutation: it evolved through symbiosis, through organisms coming together to form new organisms. Through fusion and “the long-lasting intimacy of strangers”.

While technology allows us to look beyond the limits of the human eye, it takes a leap in imagination to try to comprehend perspectives that are so different to our own. Can we imagine the world at the scale of a microbe? Can we understand life as a planetary-level phenomenon?

Perspectives beyond the human are central to the DocFest Exchange, with films exploring the world through the eyes of other animals. From Victor Kossakovsky’s intimate portrait of a mother sow and her piglets in GUNDA, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s deep dive into the insect kingdom Microcosmos, to Robin Petré’s ode to marine wildlife on the coast of England From the Wild Sea, and Allora and Calzadilla’s The Great Silence, which tells a story of human space travel through the viewpoint of an endangered parrot.

Can cinema and its tools help us become sensitive to our non-human neighbours? Can it rescale our empathy? Or, as philosopher Alan Watts asks in David OReilly’s Everything, can we understand that “every minute little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends”?

For the Karrabing Film Collective, an Indigenous filmmaking group from Northern Territory, Australia, this connection and interdependence has always been known. Through their films and filmmaking processes they explore connections to ancestral land, and the struggle to hold in place their ways of living and forms of knowledge against a backdrop of destructive mining, and the settler colonial state’s complicity in these extractive industries. Their films pay attention to worlds that are more-than-human, and to ancestral presence in the present.

A caring relationship to land and the seeds that hold potential for new life is a pillar of Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III – Micro Resistances by Marwa Arsanios. The film focuses on Indigenous seed guardians in Colombia, who are trying to preserve native seeds and communal access to fertile land in the face of a violent systematic war waged against them by transnational corporations and local landowners. Likewise, The Ants and the Grasshopper by Raj Patel and Zak Piper invites us to recognise our position as humans in relation to each other. As farmer and activist Anita Chitaya tries to first convince her community in Malawi, and, later, farmers in the USA, of the impacts of climate change, we can see both the power and the limits of the individual. Can she convince these farmers that they live on the same planet as her? Do we really live on the same planet when there is such injustice and extreme inequality between us? This year’s DocFest Exchange invites us to appreciate perspectives beyond our own; to discover what possibilities emerge when we open ourselves to other ways of seeing the world.

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— Jamie Allan

DocFest Exchange: Film Programme

Everything

Director(s): David OReilly Producer(s): David OReilly Ireland, USA / 2017 / 11’ / English

Can a video game change your view of the world? How about a video game trailer? David OReilly’s Everything is both a short film and a gameplay trailer that meanders boundlessly through the known universe. Starting from the viewpoint of a bear, before freely shifting scale and perspectives, Everything invites us to inhabit the positions of other beings – whether a mushroom, an atom, a mountain, a butterfly, a rock, a bacterium, a blade of grass, or a galaxy. Narrated by British philosopher Alan Watts (1915 - 1973), this exercise in perception celebrates the interconnectedness and subjectivity of all life. There is no narrative or story, only the universe as you see it, and the universe as it sees itself.

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From the Wild Sea Producer(s): Robin Petré Director(s): Malene Flindt Pedersen Denmark / 2021 / 78’ / UK Premiere / English

Along the raw and windy coastlines of Europe, a network of volunteers are constantly ready to rescue marine wildlife from oil spills, plastic pollution, and storms.

Night and day, all year round, they work tirelessly to rescue whales, dolphins, seals, and birds. However, things are getting worse. As the climate crisis fuels violent weather across the seas, and the annual winter storms arrive with unprecedented ferocity, their task becomes increasingly treacherous. From the Wild Sea is a poetic film that looks unflinchingly at the complex collisions between humans and other animals in the emerging era of the Anthropocene. Honouring both the human and animal perspective, the intimate gaze of the film follows volunteers as they work to rescue and rehabilitate animals back into the wild. Meanwhile, the rescued animals look right back, insisting that, whether human or animal, we are all a part of the same world.

Sales: DR International Sales

Nominated for: the First Feature Award

GUNDA

Director(s): Victor Kossakovsky Producer(s): Anita Rehoff Larsen,Joslyn Barnes Norway, USA / 2021 / 93’ / English

Sales: Altitude Film Entertainment

Every year, humans slaughter about 70 billion livestock. Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky lets the camera linger on one of these animals: the sow, Gunda. Does she know her fate? What is she thinking?

What does she think of us? Using black-and-white cinematography and an ambient soundscape of the farm’s natural noises, GUNDA invites the audience to slow down and experience life as its subjects do. From the sow Gunda and her litter of piglets, to a herd of cows, and eventually to a scene-stealing, one-legged chicken, Kossakovsky and co-cinematographer Egil Håskjold Larsen observe the animals as they are rarely seen: up-close and filled with personality.

With GUNDA, Kossakovsky movingly recalibrates our moral universe, reminding us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.

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Karrabing Film Collective – Shorts Programme

The Karrabing Film Collective use filmmaking as a form of Indigenous grassroots resistance and self-organisation. An extended family group that has over fifty members from Belyuen, Northern Territory, Australia, together, Karrabing have sought to create a model for Indigenous filmmaking and activism that brings together different tribes and languages, and conceives works through an infrastructure of communal thinking and collective experimentation. Beyond the binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present, their work exposes and intervenes into the longstanding structures of colonial violence that impact members directly: environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation.

Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ / Australia / Karrabing Film Collective / Karrabing Film Collective / 2015 / 35’ / Emmiyengal, English Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams / Australia / Karrabing Film Collective / Karrabing Film Collective / 2016 / 29’ / Emmiyengal, English Day in the Life / Australia / Karrabing Film Collective / Karrabing Film Collective / 2020 / 32’ / Emmiyengal, English Sales: Karrabing Film Collective

Microcosmos Director(s): Claude Nuridsany, Marie Pérennou Producer(s): Christophe Barratier, Yvette Mallet, Jacques Perrin France / 1996 / 80’ / English, French

Microcosmos is a journey to an unknown planet, where fantastic creatures live, obscured in deep forests of moss and grass. Where dewdrops are as large as boulders, and animals walk on water. Here, the Earth is rediscovered on a miniature scale: the unseen world of the insect kingdom. Set entirely in a quiet meadow, over the course of a single day and night, Microcosmos zooms-in on the landscape, until it morphs and transforms into something unfamiliar to the human eye. Filmed over three years, but preceded by 15 years of research, biologists-turned-filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou craft a near-wordless film that allows us, for a moment, to imagine life at the scale of an insect. Journeying deep into this perspective, the film acts as an initiation, inviting us to consider the beauty, complexity, and fragility of our shared planet.

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Symbiotic Earth Director(s): John Feldman Producer(s): Susan Davies USA / 2017 / 147’ / English

Sales: Bullfrog Films

Symbiotic Earth explores the life and ideas of Lynn Margulis, a brilliant and radical scientist, whose unconventional theories challenged the male-dominated scientific status quo and are today fundamentally changing how we look at ourselves, evolution, and the environment.

As a young scientist in the 1960s, Margulis was ridiculed when she first proposed that symbiosis was a key driver of evolution. Instead of the mechanistic view that life evolved through random genetic mutations and competition, she presented a symbiotic narrative in which bacteria joined together to create the complex cells that formed animals, plants and all other organisms. Margulis’ symbiotic narrative – and the Gaia theory, which says all life is interconnected and interdependent – presents an alternative to a destructive worldview that has led to the climate crisis: humans are not the pinnacle of life, but part of a complex cognitive system in which each of our actions has repercussions.

The Ants and the Grasshopper Director(s): Raj Patel, Zak Piper Producer(s): Rachel Wexler, Peter Mazunda, Raj Patel, Zak Piper, Cynthia Kane Malawi / 2021 / 74’ / International Premiere / English, Tumbuka

Sales: Kartemquin Films 214

Anita Chitaya has a gift: she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and maybe she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home in Malawi from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate sceptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions that shape the USA: from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, and to the American exceptionalism that remains a part of the culture. It will take all her skill and experience to help Americans recognise, and free themselves from, a logic that is already destroying the Earth.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

The Great Silence Director(s): Allora & Calzadilla Producer(s): Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla / USA / 2014 / 17’ / English

The Great Silence centres on the world’s largest radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which transmits and scans for signals from the farthest reaches of the universe. As astronomers listen for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence in outer space, the critically-endangered Amazona vittata parrots that surround the observatory ask: “why aren’t humans interested in our voices?” Featuring a script by science fiction author Ted Chiang, The Great Silence ponders the contradiction of a species so intent on communication with others, yet so destructive to life on its own planet. With the power of a fable, the parrots tell the story of humans’ search for other intelligent life, while lamenting their own imminent extinction and the subsequent loss of their language, stories, and traditions.

Sales: Galerie Chantal Crousel

Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III – Micro Resistances Director(s): Marwa Arsanios Producer(s): Marwa Arsanios Colombia / 2020 / 31’ / English, Spanish

Sales: Mor Charpentier

Marwa Arsanios’ Who is Afraid of Ideology? series (2017 - 2020) weaves together ecological activism, the struggles of women, and Indigenous land rights, from Northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan to the so-called ‘coffee belt’ of Colombia. Self-defence, autonomy, collectivity, eco-feminism, Indigenous struggle, and seed-protection define the common ground for these women in their resistance to the capitalist logic of extraction and exploitation of the land. The last film in this trilogy, Part III - Micro Resistances, takes place in Tolima, Colombia, and focuses on the ongoing systemic war waged by transnational corporations against one of the smallest and most essential elements of life: the seed. Against forced displacements, violence and murder, Indigenous women are preserving their native seeds, and an ancestral knowledge of cultivation and care.

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Who We Were Director(s): Marc Bauder Producer(s): Marc Bauder Germany / 2021 / 114’ / UK Premiere / English, French, German

Sales: Films Boutique

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“We were the ones who knew, but did not understand, full of information but lacking insight, brimming with knowledge, but lacking experience. So we just kept forging ahead, unstopped by ourselves.” The German intellectual Roger Willemsen wrote these words, in his posthumous essay, Who We Were. Marc Bauder’s film of the same title takes inspiration from this essay, and asks what future generations will think of us. Will they look back on us in despair? For director Marc Bauder, this change in perspective invites us to rethink our present. From outer space to the depths of the ocean, from a G20 summit to the site of a nuclear disaster, Bauder meets six thinkers and scientists who speculate on our past, present and possible futures: astronaut Alexander Gerst, economist Dennis Snower, molecular biologist and monk Matthieu Ricard, deep sea researcher Sylvia Earle, philosopher Felwine Sarr and post-human theorist Janina Loh.

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DocFest Exchange: Talks & Workshops

Learning from the More-Than-Human: Audio Walk and Online Workshop 11:00 (BST) / Wed 9 June / Online

Join us for an online workshop and audio walk exploring the living beings at our doorstep: tiny mosses, invisible mycelium, and (almost) immortal lichen.

Recognising them and other critters as our kin and noticing their cooperation might enable us to learn something new together. In this online workshop, we will collectively develop an awareness of the morethan-human worlds around us. Practising attentiveness to life at all scales, we will see what other ways of knowing, doing, becoming and relating can be possible when we detach ourselves from an anthropocentric perspective.

Sanctuary of the Sensuous: Audio Walk and Online Workshop with Foresta Collective 11:00 (BST) / Thu 10 June / Online

How can we expand our perceptions beyond a reductionist view of ‘nature’? Join us for an online workshop and audio walk to heighten our attention and ways of listening to more-than-human worlds. In collaboration with ecophysiologist Dr Steve Portugal, we will be paying special attention to the sensory world and behaviour of birds.

Hosted by Foresta Collective.

Hosted by Alen Ksoll, Jamie Allan, Ko-Fan Lin and Sina Ribak

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Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club 13:00 (BST) / Fri 11 June / Online

For microbiologist Lynn Margulis, evolution is not as simple as a tree of life: “The tree of life grows in on itself. Species come together, fuse, and make new beings.” Join us for a group reading and informal discussion inspired by Margulis’ revolutionary findings. How can her theories inspire us to see our living Earth beyond the traditional human-centred western perspective?

Moderators: Sina Ribak, researcher for ecologies and the arts, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist Stories of Other Animals 12:00 (BST) / Sat 12 June / Online

Who are ‘We’? Global and Local Visions 14:00 (BST) / Sat 12 June / Online

The climate crisis is a global problem. We need to change our way of living if we are to avert disaster.

But who is ‘we’? Who is responsible? And who is most affected? Join this panel discussion with farmer and community activist Anita Chitaya, filmmaker and author Raj Patel, and director Marc Bauder to explore our understanding of the global, and the crisis with how we view this crisis.

Participants: Raj Patel (academic, author and director of The Ants and the Grasshopper), Anita Chitaya (farmer, climate change activist, community leader and protagonist in The Ants and the Grasshopper), Marc Bauder (director of Who We Were) Seeds for a Common Future 12:00 (BST) / Sun 13 June / Online

Moderator: Jamie Allan Participants: Victor Kossakovsy (director of GUNDA), Robin Petré (director of From the Wild Sea), Danielle Celermajer (professor of sociology at the University of Sydney and research lead for the Multispecies Justice collective), pattrice jones (ecofeminist writer, educator, activist and co-founder of VINE Sanctuary for farmed animals in Vermont, USA)

An open forum bringing together radical projects from Malawi, Rojava and Yorkshire that are rethinking relationships to land, food, soil, and seeds. In very different contexts these projects build community infrastructure to support local autonomy and food sovereignty. Join us for a down-to-earth discussion about food sustainability, and how to build a communal ecological life.

Moderator: Jamie Allan Participants: Mary Clear (community activist, chair of Incredible Edible Todmorden), Nesrîn Qadir (activist from Jinwar Free Women’s Village in Rojava/ Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria), Esther Lupafya (director of Soil, Food and Healthy Communities and protagonist in The Ants and the Grasshopper)

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What stories do we tell about non-human beings?

Can we really empathise with a way of being that seems so different to ours? From pigs and chickens in GUNDA to seals and whales in From the Wild Sea, we will discuss the importance and challenges of making films about other animals and ask how storytelling can connect us more deeply with other species.

Storytelling as Collective Resistance 14:00 (BST) / Sun 13 June / Online

“By always being able to tell one more story, we postpone the end of the world.” – Ailton Krenak Join Elizabeth Povinelli of Karrabing Film Collective and Indigenous filmmakers Sueli and Isael Maxakali in conversation to discuss storytelling as a medium of resistance, Indigenous cinema as a communal act, and the rituals of filmmaking as an indivisible part of the films themselves.

Participants: Elizabeth Povinelli (professor of anthropology & gender studies at Columbia University and founding member of Karrabing Film Collective), Sueli Maxakali (co-director of Nuhu Yãg Mu Yõg Hãm: This Land is our Land!), Isael Maxakali (co-director of Nuhu Yãg Mu Yõg Hãm: This Land is our Land!)

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Learning How to Live Together: A Symbiotic Worldview 17:00 (BST) / Sun 13 June / Online

Through studying the world of bacteria, biologist Lynn Margulis proposed her theory that the origin of life is not competition, but symbiosis. Organisms collaborating to survive. The human body as a symbiotic community of bacteria, fungi, and animal cells.

Join us for a lively discussion with artists, historians and scientists about how a symbiotic understanding of life could inspire a more caring, collaborative and collective view of the world.

Participants: Grégory Castéra (curator and course leader of Collective Practices: Symbiotic Organisations at Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm), Suzanne Pierre (microbial ecologist, biogeochemist, and founder of the Critical Ecology Lab), Salome Rodeck (cultural and literary scholar, doctoral researcher with the project Symbiotic Worldview: Theories and Practices of Coexistence in the Anthropocene)

DocFest Exchange

Community Programme Workshops A series of online group workshops inspired by documentaries from across the Sheffield DocFest programme produced in partnership with local organisations and artists.

Sister: Sistah - The Erasure of the Dark-Skinned Black Woman in Mainstream Media A participatory workshop inspired by Delphine’s Prayers 14:00 (BST) / Sat 5 June / Online A workshop with Nyara Arts centering on how media representations of the dark-skinned black woman affect the audience who look like her. What messages are being portrayed? How are they digested? How does she feel to rarely see herself portrayed positively? How does she navigate this? How can/should we challenge it? This session will also look at the trope of ‘The strong Black woman’ and her ability and right to express vulnerability.

With Danae Wellington, Nyara School of Arts.

When We Click: Making Music Even When We’re Not Together A participatory workshop inspired by Alone Together 19:00 (BST) / Mon 7 June / Online In this workshop we will be working remotely as a group to create a shared sample library, then use those samples to record our own beats and compositions. No experience necessary! But you will need a smartphone or tablet on which you can install apps (iPhone/iPad or Android is fine).

With Lucy Cheesman, SONA – Sound Art Collective.

We Are Family: The Special Bond of Singing A participatory workshop inspired by Men Who Sing 19:00 (BST) / Tues 8 June / Online Post-industrial traditions of singing rooted in the labour movement and the folk history of voice.

With Val Regan, Natural Voice Network and Out Aloud.

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Fire and Land: Ritualistic Movement and Spirituality A participatory workshop inspired by Firestarter: The Story of Bangarra 19:00 (BST) / Wed 9 June / Online With a ritualistic approach to movement, this session offers a release of energy and empowerment through simple choreography whilst respectfully exploring the influence of Bantu and spiritual practices.

With Angelina Abe, Mulembas D’Africa.

Solidarity Forever: Community Organising and Creative Disruption A participatory workshop inspired by Factory to the Workers 15:15 (BST) / Sat 12 June / Online A workshop about grassroots movements and how to take action in your community – how to share skills and creativity through collective action to effect change at the local, regional, national, and international levels.

With Tchiyiwe Chihana Soundtracking Streets - Found Sounds and Impromptu Music A participatory workshop inspired by From the 84 Days 15:15 (BST) / Sun 13 June / Online An alternative and progressive take on folk and song-writing, exploring themes on social politics, history and environment.

With Jim Ghedi.

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Talks Resonating across the programme, we are presenting a series of talks, panels, and other events, which aim to deepen and broaden conversation around film and art, and to provide an opportunity for you to meet the filmmakers and artists involved in the films and projects that form this year’s festival.

From conversations about our Retrospective programmes, to talks and masterclasses – including talent such as David Olusoga, Campbell X, Lydia Lunch, Marc Isaacs, Mark Cousins, Betsy West and Julie Cohen, Zinzi Minott, and Al Wong, among many others.

Between Reminiscence and Reactivation: a collective reflection.

16:00 (BST) / Sat 5 June / Online

Emily Chao and Al Wong in Conversation.

18:00 (BST) Sat 5 June / Online

Between Reminiscence and Reactivation is a conversation framed around artists whose work with archival materials has led to cross-generational reflections, and exchange of new ideas. The four participants – with practices ranging across writing, film exhibition, moving image and performance – will outline their experience working with archives, and focus on how they share their contemporary perspectives on these materials.

Chair: Myriam Mouflih Speakers: Yasmine Benabdallah, Courtney Stephens, Alison S.M. Kobayashi, Sido Lansari

BBC Interview: David Olusoga 15.30 (BST) Sat 5 June / Showroom Cinema 4 + Livestream The British-Nigerian historian and broadcaster joins us for this year’s BBC Interview to discuss his work as author, academic and documentarian, exploring and uncovering the forgotten histories of Empire and colonialism. David is also one of the guest curators of our 2021 Retrospective: Films belong to those who need them – fragments from the history of Black British Cinema, which celebrates the history of Black British culture on the screen.

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A meeting between the artists in our exhibition ‘Dialogues: Emily Chao & Al Wong’, on view at Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab and online. Since the 1960s, Al Wong’s singular practice has incorporated film/video, installation and photography, whereas Emily Chao’s short analogue films have all been made since 2015. Moderated by Herb Shellenberger, this cross-generational dialogue focuses on points of connection between the artists’ practices through their working processes, visual aesthetics and Asian American heritage.

Notes From the Field: working strategies for non-fiction artists 13:00 (BST) Sun 6 June / Online How can artists working in non-fiction and across different forms approach funding, production and exhibition? In this talk geared towards creative practitioners, we’ll hear different perspectives from across the UK arts sector on artist-run networks, how to target funding opportunities, when to consider working with a producer, and ideas on creating relationships with exhibitors.

Chair: David Gilbert (Director, Bloc Projects) Speakers: Will Rose (Director, Pavilion), Qila Gill (Producer), Christine Eyene (Curator, Biennale Internationale de Casablanca)

Sheffield DocFest 2021

So Real It Hurts: In Conversation with Lydia Lunch 15:00 (BST) Sun 6 June / Online Singer, poet, writer, and actress Lydia Lunch has been a counterculture icon since the late 70s. Having collaborated with a number of filmmakers over the years, Lydia will speak about being the star of Beth B’s new film, The War Is Never Over, how she documents her reality through multiple mediums, and what success looks like as a fiercely anti-commercial artist.

The Return: Life After ISIS – reframing the narrative 17:00 (BST) Sun 6 June / Online Alba Sotorra Clua’s new film The Return: Life After ISIS explores the lives of women who devoted themselves to ISIS, but who now want to be given the chance to start over, back home in the West. Join Alba and a panel of filmmakers and activists to discuss how film can reframe conversations around this controversial topic, and foster dialogue and understanding.

The Art of Staging Reality: Marc Isaacs in conversation with Jon Bang Carlsen 16.00 (BST) / Fri 11 June / Showroom Cinema 4 + Livestream Jon Bang Carlsen, one of Denmark’s most celebrated filmmakers, joins Marc Isaacs to discuss the necessity of inventing reality. Whether we work with fiction or documentary, we are telling stories, because that is the only way we can approach the world: stories are a way of describing or interpreting the space between objective reality and personal reality. Join us in this exploration of the working methods of a true innovator.

Reframing Our Desires 13:00 Sat 12 June / Online Campbell X – writer, director and guest curator – joins filmmakers from his programme, Destroy | Disturb | Disrupt – Decolonizing Queer Desire (pg X), to explore how they create their own filmic language to disrupt our colonised historical framing by the white, straight cisgender lens. This discussion forms part of our Retrospective: Films belong to those who need them – fragments from the history of Black British Cinema.

Chair: Campbell X Speakers: Natasha Ruwona, Topher Campbell, Diego Paulino + more tbc

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Story of Looking: In Conversation with Mark Cousins 14:00 (BST) Sat 12 June / Abbeydale Picture House + Livestream Facing the threat of losing his sight, award-winning filmmaker Mark Cousins embarks on an intimate odyssey from his bed, to explore the central role of looking in his own life and in the past, present and future of human experience. Join us in conversation with Mark as we delve into how looking can paint a portrait of our culture.

BAFTA Masterclass: Betsy West & Julie Cohen 15:00 (BST) Sat 12 June / Online The BAFTA nominated directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen join us for this year’s BAFTA masterclass. In conversation with Mariayah Kaderbhai (Head of Programmes, BAFTA), they will discuss their filmmaking practices, including their latest film My Name is Pauli Murray (2021), about the life of the trailblazing LGBTQI+ and civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and Academy Award nominated RGB (2018), about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Sonic Register: British black womxn and onscreen performativity This pre-recorded conversation will be available for free online. Date TBC. Sonic Register: British black womxn and onscreen performativity takes its inspiration from Rabz Lansiquot (Where Did We Land, 2019), Zinzi Minott (FI DEM, 2018, 2019, 2020) and music iconography. Judah Attille and guests welcome ‘Pat’ (Cassie McFarlane, Burning an Illusion, Menelik Shabazz, 1981) and ‘Anita’ (Anjela Lauren Smith, Babymother, Julian Henriques, 1998), into the complexities of representation as a liberatory strategy.

How to perform (in) a crisis: Geraldine Snell and Mohamed Abdelkarim 17:00 (BST) Sat 12 June / Online Moderated by Soukaina Aboulaoula, this event invites performance artists Geraldine Snell and Mohamed Abdelkarim to discuss their practices, and the use of performance as a tool for research and investigation into our daily lives. The featured artists will share insights on the evolution of performance art throughout the past year, particularly the challenges of engaging audiences from a distance and through virtual means.

Talks

Industry Talks

Working with the BFI National Archive 13:00 / Sat 5 June / Online

The Case for Documentary Funding 11:00 / Mon 7 June / Online

Founded in 1935, the BFI National Archive cares for Britain’s national collection of moving image, one of the largest and most diverse in the world. Alongside a million film and TV items, paper collections include a dazzling array of scripts, stills, posters and designs.

This event offers an introduction to BFI collections and how producers and filmmakers can engage with them, from the practicalities of footage licensing and rights clearance to in-house curatorial expertise and opportunities for bespoke broadcast collaboration.

The recent UWE report ‘Keeping it Real’ determined UK documentary to be “chronically under-funded, under-valued and rarely understood even by executives in the wider screen industries”. Among many recommendations, the researchers highlight the need to raise the cultural status of feature documentary and champion its social value. This session assembles international perspectives to explore how the case for documentary funding is made abroad and reflect on how it can be articulated in the UK.

Making My First Film 10: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online

First Cut: The Top Tips 12: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online

The BBC invites five young filmmakers to share their experiences of making their first film for BBC Three.

This is a chance to find out how they got that break and what they learned along the way – from pitching their own ideas and working with editors to filming hacks and navigating the next steps in their directing career

David Brindley, CCO of TwoFour, ex-BBC and C4 commissioner and former First Cut director, hosts a panel of both highly successful and still-rising First Cut directors. They talk candidly about the scheme, what they learned and what they wished they had asked when directing their first hour-long film. This talk offers insights into the dos and don’ts of First Cut – and how to get one commissioned!

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Punching Through In Primetime: Elevating Diversity 13: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online

Beyond Story: A Conversation for the Industry (II) 18: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online

Success and creative freedom for producers is inevitably linked to commercial viability, but is there a lack of support for diverse led companies in achieving success? Rejecting the idea that only some companies can make popular programmes and succeed in mainstream TV, and addressing concerns that talent and new perspectives are overlooked, a panel of Channel 5 gatekeepers and producers take a frank look at the industry, the opportunities available, and finding a balance between commercial success and creative passion.

To coincide with the launch of ‘World Records Vol. 5: Beyond Story’ and to continue the conversation with industry gatekeepers initiated at DocFest in 2019, sparked by the online community manifesto from Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow, this session brings together scholars, filmmakers and industry commissioners to discuss and examine why ‘story’ has become today’s pre-eminent mode for documentary, and what gets lost when storied structures prevail.

Journalism & Creative Documentary 15: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online Presented by The Guardian, this session discusses the ways in which journalism and creative documentary can successfully intersect. What can the pursuit of creative documentary learn from the principles of good journalism – and vice-versa – and why does that matter in the 21st century? And what are the possibilities for collaboration?

Chicken & Egg Pictures’ 2021 (Egg)celerator Lab Pitch 16: 00 / Mon 7 June / Online The (Egg)celerator Lab is a Chicken & Egg Pictures program focused on identifying and supporting nonfiction directors working on their first or second feature-length documentary. This program brings together 10 projects, with a special focus on self-identifying women and gender nonconforming directors. The 2021 (Egg)celerator Lab participants will pitch their projects to a panel of international decision makers and industry representatives taking part in DocFest’s online marketplace.

Moderated by award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand, Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Co-Founder and Senior Creative Consultant.

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UK Commissioners: Looking Ahead 10: 00 / Tue 8 June / Online Factual commissioners assemble to look ahead and share what’s in store from the broadcasters in the coming months. Tune in to clue-up on the variety of editorial directions, programme announcements, and the latest initiatives and opportunities for UK producers and talent.

Know Your Rights: Bullying and Discrimination in the Workplace 11: 00 / Tue 8 June / Online Navigating bullying and discrimination in the workplace can be confroting, confusing and complicated, especially in the film & TV industry when formal processes may not always be in place or made clear.

This session will explore the rights of freelancers and employees, avenues for reporting and ways in which companies, institutions, and policy around these matters can be improved.

Female Gaze 12: 00 / Tue 8 June / Online Women are still the largest consumers of broadcast media and yet are still underrepresented on and off screen and they still struggle to obtain leadership roles. Channel 4 Factual have been leading the way of changing this in the industry with over 50% of directors used being females for single films and limited series. A panel of expert directors discuss how an increased female perspective can progress documentary filmmaking across the board.

Talks

Tell Your Story with ITV Studios 13:00 / Tue 8 June / Online How does a producer get the total financing for a project when broadcasters pay less than 100% of the budget? And at what stage could a producer go to a distributor? Discover the answers and learn how ITV Studios have helped finance projects and bring them to audiences worldwide.

The Whickers Pitch 15:00 / Tue 8 June / Online Who will be awarded the coveted £80,000 Film & TV Funding Award to make their first feature-length documentary? The Whickers Pitch brings together five emerging directors from around the world to pitch their non-fiction projects to a panel of industry judges. Log on to support the finalists, be your own armchair judge and bear witness as the legacy of pioneering broadcaster Alan Whicker brings another exceptional documentary idea to life.

Working with ESPN 16:00 / Tue 8 June / Online Since the launch of 30 for 30, the series has become one of the premiere brands in all of documentary film. With over ninety documentaries under its belt, including the 2017 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, O.J: Made in America, ESPN has helped foster a genre that continues to grow exponentially.

Join Senior Director Of Development at ESPN Adam Neuhaus to discuss the evolution of the channel.

Docs Online 18.00 / Tue 8 June / Online Looking to watch docs online beyond the most wellknown platforms & channels? Or perhaps you’re a filmmaker interested in connecting your work with audiences. Join this session to hear representatives from a variety of online film spaces discuss their collections, curatorial approaches and processes for considering and showcasing new work.

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BFI Doc Society and FWD-Doc present: Reimagining Disability in Documentary 19.00 / Tue 8 June / Online Through authentic storytelling, disabled filmmakers are demanding representation, refusing ableist conventions, and securing critical recognition along the way. The time is now for dismantling barriers across the doc sector and powering inclusivity and accessibility for D/deaf and disabled talent. Meet the filmmakers who are reshaping the narrative and learn how BFI Doc Society is working with the FWD-Doc collective to inspire new audiences for British disability-centred documentaries.

This event will be BSL interpreted

EU-UK Co-Productions After Brexit 10:00 / Wed 9 June / Online How can UK and European producers co-produce in the post-Brexit era? What criteria must be fulfilled for co-production and eligibility for tax relief and UK and European Funds? Presented in partnership with the Documentary Association of Europe (DAE), producers and policy experts will share experience and expertise on co-production opportunities for EU and UK filmmakers as well as discuss what principles should guide policy going forward.

Working with UKTV 11:00 / Wed 9 June / Online UKTV’s network of channels reaches 30 million viewers a month and the commissioning team are working with their biggest ever budget over the next 12 months. The broadcaster’s Head of Factual and Factual Entertainment Hilary Rosen and Senior Commissioning Editor Helen Nightingale are returning to Sheffield DocFest this year to divulge their top tips for getting your ideas to them, how to establish a working relationship and how to make a successful, long-running show for popular factual channels W, Yesterday and Gold.

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Working with Sky 12:00 / Wed 9 June / Online

WaterBear Pitch 16.00 / Weds 9 June / Online

In its first year, Sky Documentaries has seen stellar performances for films and series such as Framing Britney Spears, McMillions, and TINA, across Sky Documentaries, Sky Nature and Sky Crime. The UKbased content team – led by Poppy Dixon, Director of Documentaries and Factual – will give a preview of upcoming content, share their vision for the channel’s future and give a snapshot of the type shows they are looking to commission.

WaterBear is a new interactive video platform dedicated to supporting life on our fragile planet through world-class storytelling, cutting-edge technology and a global network of partners working together for impact. In partnership with Sheffield Hallam University and Sheffield DocFest, WaterBear will award a proposal for a student short film (<5 mins) with a £500 production grant and presentation of the completed film on the WaterBear platform.

Whose Voice? Whose Story?

18:00 / Wed 9 June / Online As part of this year’s festival, the BBC is hosting a special session to explore how background, experience and identity shapes the stories we tell. A panel of established filmmakers and journalists will discuss the relevance of who is telling the story, both from their own perspectives and also more broadly, as wellknown story tellers.

The Whickers Award Ceremony 18.00 / Thu 10 June / Online Everyone is invited to join us for The Whickers Award Ceremony. It’s happening via Zoom on Thursday 10 June at 18:00 BST. Dust down your party frock, grab a bottle of bubbly and join us. We can’t wait to see you there!

Working with National Geographic 15:00 / Wed 9 June / Online In the wake of this extraordinary and unprecedented year, National Geographic continues to focus on telling stories that transport audiences around the world. In this session, the UK-based commissioning team share insights into the development and production of exceptional content that supports the National Geographic Society’s core mission of science, exploration, conservation and education. Hear what it takes to bring globe-spanning ideas to life for National Geographic’s platforms.

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Talks

Partner Showcases & Events

Chilean Spotlight

Chilean film culture is undoubtedly one of the richest and most surprising. Deeply rooted in a very complex and painful social and political history, Chilean filmmakers, in many different ways, have invented unique visions, imagined extraordinary universes and found brave forms of confronting reality. This small collection of recent films highlights this richness, the breadth of the country’s cinematic legacy. Films are available on DocPlayer and Selects platforms.

Memory Revisited: Focus Taiwan

In the historic context of Taiwan, ‘Memory Revisited’ also means ‘History Revisited’. This program emphasises personal and artistic perspectives that use archive footage to challenge the ideologies that were instilled into Taiwan’s citizens in the past – as well as this, these films also show how diverse Taiwan society and Taiwan cinema is! — Wood LIN, Curator

El Otro / The Other One, Francisco Bermejo, Chile, 75’, 2020 Harley Queen, Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, Chile, 100’, 2019 Haydee y el Pez Volador / Haydee and the Flying Fish, Pachi Bustos, Chile/Brazil, 73’, 2019 Los Reyes, Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, Chile/ Germany, 78’, 2018 Visión Nocturna / Night Shot, Carolina Moscoso, Chile, 80’, 2019

解體概要 / A Short History of Decay, LIN Shih-chieh, Taiwan, 6’, 2014 昔日拼貼 / Resampling the Past, Marco WILMS, Taiwan, 16’, 2010 一中 / One World One Dream, CHUNG Chuan, Public Television Service Foundation (PTS), Taiwan, 20’, 2018 回程列車 / Return, HUANG Pang-chuan, Natalia TREBIK, France, 20’, 2018 斷線風箏 / The Falling Kite, HSIAO Mei-ling, Taiwan, 42’, 1999 此岸 一個家族故事 / This Shore: A Family Story, Tzu-An WU, Tzu-An WU, Taiwan, USA, 62’, 2020 童年往事 / The Time to Live and the Time to Die, Hsiao-Hsien HOU, Chui Gwok-Leung, Taiwan, 18’, 1985

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Films are available on DocPlayer and Selects platforms.

Channel 4 Digital Factual 1-2-1 Commissioners Factual Virtual Speed Meets 12:00 - 13:00 BST / Fri 11 Jun / Online Channel 4 Digital Factual content prides itself in featuring the experiences, voices and views of young people living across the UK today, distributed exclusively on digital platforms. As part of the online industry programme at Sheffield DocFest, we are hosting an opportunity for you to pitch your short form Factual strands and mid-form documentary ideas to Channel 4 commissioners in online 1-2-1 meetings.

UKTV 1-2-1 Commissioner Virtual Speed Meets 10:00 - 11:30 BST / Thu 10 Jun / Online UKTV is currently looking for factual and factual entertainment ideas for W, Yesterday and Gold. As part of the online industry programme, Sheffield DocFest are hosting an opportunity for filmmakers to pitch new factual programme ideas to UKTV commissioners in online 1-2-1 meetings. Pre-event registration is required, please visit the Sheffield DocFest website for more information.

Doc Society Filmmaker 1:2:1 Drop In 12:00 - 14:30 BST / Tue 8 Jun / Online Doc Society invites doc filmmakers of all levels to jump online for a 15 minute 1:2:1 session with members of their team. Chat over a virtual Yorkshire brew about creative documentary filmmaking, funding for UK short and feature documentaries, audience engagement strategies, impactful climate storytelling, the Good Pitch programme and where to access further support and resources. Pre-event registration is required, please visit the Sheffield DocFest website for more information.

Works In Progress Presentation | Northern Ireland Screen 15:00 - 16:30 BST / Thu 10 June / Online Filmmakers from the Northern Ireland delegation will present works in progress to a mix of industry representatives for feedback and advice. All Doc/Fest Online Industry Pass holders are invited to attend the session as observers. Hosted via Zoom. See website for registration details.

Works In Progress Presentation | Screen Scotland / SDI 15:00 - 16:30 BST / Wed 9 Jun / Online Filmmakers from the Scottish delegation will present works in progress to a mix of industry representatives for feedback and advice. Industry representatives who are taking part in the MeetMarket may contact Patrick Hurley about gaining observer access to this session: patrick.hurley@sheffdocfest.com

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Partner Showcases & Events

Sales Contacts: Film “ .” / “The red filter is withdrawn.”, directed by Minjung Kim Sales contact: Minjung Kim, minjungkim@alum.calarts.edu Aforismos del Lago / Aphorisms of the Lake, directed by Humberto González Bustillo Sales contact: Héctor Silva Núñez, Distributor / Films 808 / hectorfranciscosilva@gmail.com / +56985863866 À la recherche d’Aline / Finding Aline, directed by Rokhaya Marieme Balde Sales contact: Delphine Jeanneret, HEAD – Genève / delphine.jeanneret@hesge.ch Ali and His Miracle Sheep, directed by Maythem Ridha Sales contact: Maythem, Productions@7thHeavenStudios.com Alive, directed by Makeda Matheson Sales contact: Makeda Matheson, makedamatheson@gmail.com / +44 7908818255 All Light, Everywhere, directed by Theo Anthony Sales contact: Salma Abdalla, Autlook Filmsales / welcome@autlookfilms.com / https://www.autlookfilms.com

Ancient Sunshine, directed by Jason Livingston Sales contact: Jason Livingston, livingston.jason@gmail.com / +16073399112 Auksinis Flakonas / Golden Flask, directed by Jurgis Matulevicius, Paulius Anicas Sales contact: Stasys Baltakis, Producer / Film Jam / baltakiss@gmail.com / +37060507462 / https://www.filmjam.eu/ Aus den 84 Tagen / From the 84 Days, directed by Philipp Hartmann Sales contact: Philipp Hartmann, mail@flumenfilm.de Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton / With Sonia Wieder-Atherton, directed by Chantal Akerman Sales contact: Melen Bouetard, The Party Film Sales / sales@thepartysales.com Babymother, directed by Julien Henriques Sales contact: Jessica Levick, Film4 / JLevick@Channel4.co.uk Barataria, directed byJulie Nguyen Van Qui Sales contact: Jean-Marie Gigona / SaNoSi Productions / prod@sanosi-productions.com

All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes, directed by Haig Aivazian Sales contact: Haig Aivazian, haigaivazian@gmail.com

Barrage d’arrêt fixe et fermé au niveau du carrefour Hamdalaye / Fixed barricade at Hamdalaye crossing, directed by Thomas Bauer Sales contact: Thomas Bauer, Filmmaker / Poteau d’angle / thomas.bauer.etc@gmail.com / +33 680111808

Alone Together, directed by Bradley & Pablo Sales contact: Ross Levine, Producer / rosslevine11@gmail.com

Batería, directed by Damian Sainz Sales contact:Valentina Suarez, GONELLA PRODUCTIONS / diffusion@gonellaproductions.com

Alvorada Palace, directed by Anna Muylaert, Lo Politi Sales contact: Ivan melo, Producer / cupfilmes / www. cupfilmes.com / +5511998487573 / www.cupfilmes.com

Bílá na bílé / White on White, directed by Viera Čákanyová Sales contact:Nina Numankadić, nina@dafilms.com Blacks Britannica, directed by David Koff Sales contact:Margaret Henry, Postcolonial Films Ltd / postcolonialfilms@btinternet.com

Amine, directed by Beverley Bennett Sales contact: Karen Alexander, karenalex606@gmail.com A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro / The White Death of the Black Wizard, directed by Rodrigo Ribeiro Sales contact: Rodrigo Ribeiro, rodrigo.rbo@gmail.com / +55 (48) 99604-5073 / www.gatamaior.com.br 230

BLONDIE: VIVIR EN LA HABANA, directed by Rob Roth Sales contact:Tommy Manzi, Manager / thomasmanzi@ mac.com / +1 212 785 1133

Sheffield DocFest 2021

Blood Ah Go Run, directed by Menelik Shabazz, Imruh Caesar Sales contact:Menelik Shabazz, meneliks@gmail.com

Drawings of my BF, directed by James Cooper Sales contact:James Cooper, cooperojames@gmail.com

Bloom, directed by A.T., Journal du Pôle Sales contact: Antony Thegeya, Journal du Pôle / journaldupole@gmail.com

Elnaz Jan / Dear Elnaz, directed by Mania Akbari Sales contact: Cryptofiction, info@crypto-fiction. com / www.crypto-fiction.com

BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi), directed by Heidi (Jade) Ramírez Sales contact: Fatou Cabo Diagne, fatcabdia1213@gmail.com / +34 698 533 645

El silencio del Topo / The silence of the Mole, directed by Anais Taracena Sales contact: Anais Taracena, taracena.anais@gmail.com

Bruce Takes Dragon Town, directed by Emily Chao Sales contact: Emily Chao, chao.emily@gmail.com / nolandfilms.com

E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo, directed by Lynne Sachs Sales contact: María Vera, KINO REBELDE / distribution@kinorebelde.com / www.kinorebelde.com

Burning an Illusion, directed by Menelik Shabazz Sales contact: Menelik Shabazz, meneliks@gmail.com Carlos Ghosn The Last Flight, directed by Nick Green Sales contact: Joe Patrick, MBC / joeapatrick1@gmail.com CAER / CAUGHT, directed by Nicola Mai Sales contact: Nicola Mai, mainicola@gmail.com / +447726963922 / www.caer-film.org Charm Circle, directed by Nira Burstein Sales contact: Betsy Laikin, betsydara@gmail.com Chelas nha Kau, directed by Bagabaga Studios, Bataclan 1950 Sales contact: José Magro, jnmagro@gmail.com Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1), directed by Mitch McCabe Sales contact: Mitch McCabe, Company Chipped Nails Pictures, Inc. / mitchfilm@gmail.com Cold Stack, directed by Frank Martin Sales contact: Frank Martin, frankelimartin@gmail.com / +447879524800 Courage, directed by Aliaksei Paluyan Sales contact: Diana Karklin, Rise And Shine World Sales / info@riseandshine-berlin.de

El Susurro de Las Hojas / The Whisper of the Leaves, directed by Amir Aether Valen Sales contact: Giselle Cruz, Promoción Internacional EICTV / promocioninternacional@eictv.co.cu, gielena14@gmail.com / Phone + Fax: +53 47 38 3152 al 56, EXT: 557 Equatorial Constellations, directed by Silas Tiny Sales contact: Teresa Gusmão, DIVINA COMÉDIA / teresa@divinacomedia.pt É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo / Riverock, directed by Paula Gaitán Sales contact: Vitor Graize, Producer / Pique-Bandeira Filmes / vitorgraize@gmail.com / +5527992938085 Esquirlas / Splinters, directed by Natalia Garayalde Sales contact: Eva Caceres, evabelenc@gmail.com Everything, directed by David OReilly Sales contact:Yael Greenberg, yael@yaelgreenberg.com Fetish, directed by Topher Campbell Sales contact: Topher Campbell, topherartist@outlook.com Fi Dem, Fi Dem II, Fi Dem III, directed by Zinzi Minott Sales contact: Zinzi Minott, zinzi@zinziminott.com

Day in the Life, directed by Karrabing Film Collective Sales contact: Elizabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective / https://karrabing.info/

Final Account, directed by Luke Holland Sales contact: Helena Cottrell, helena.cottrell@nbcuni.com

Domani si vedrà / Tomorrow We’ll See, directed by Lorenzo Vitrone Sales contact: Camilla Ricci, camilla.ricci97@outlook.it

Firestarter - The Story of Bangarra, directed by Nel Minchin, Wayne Blair Sales contact: Lisa Pieroni, ABC Commercial / Pieroni.

Lisa@abc.net.au / www.abccommercial.com

Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8, directed by Daniel Draper, Allan Melia Sales contact: Daniel Draper, info@shutoutthelight.co.uk

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Fra det vilde hav / From the Wild Sea, directed by Robin Petré Sales contact: Freja Johanne Nørgaard Sørensen, Executive Sales Manager / DR International Sales / drsales@dr.dk / 45 3520 3040 / www.drsales.dk Sales Contacts

God Beloi Luni / The Year of the White Moon, directed by Maxim Pechersky Sales contact: Yanna Buryak, Sales Agent / VOSTOK / sales@vostok.global / +79170234282 . / Gorbachev. Heaven, directed by Vitaly Mansky Sales contact: Liselot Verbrugge, Sales & Acquisitions / Deckert Distribution / liselot@deckert-distribution. com / https://deckert-distribution.com/ Grenzland / Borderland, directed by Andreas Voigt Sales contact: Barbara Etz, Producer / Barbara Etz Filmproduction / bef.etz@t-online.de Growing Love, directed by Claire Davies Sales contact: Claire Davies, clairedaviesinfo@gmail.com / 07734846519 GUNDA, directed by Victor Kossakovsky Sales contact: Bryony Forde, Altitude Film Entertainment / bryonyforde@altitudefilment.com / www.altitudefilment.com Hanging On, directed by Alfie Barker Sales contact: Hollie Bryan, hollie@cosmosquarefilms.co.uk / +4407749527669 Homenaje a la obra de Philip Henry Gosse / Homage to the work of Philip Henry Gosse, directed by Pablo Martin Weber Sales contact: Mila Cabral Montejano, Distributor / Periferia Cine / milagros.cabralm@periferiacine.com Homes for the People, directed by Kay Mander Sales contact: Ros Cranston, BFI / Ros.Cranston@bfi.org.uk Horvath, directed by Jim Wraith Sales contact: Sam Barnett, sam.barnett098@gmail.com / 07966096015 I Get Knocked Down, directed by Sophie Robinson Sales contact: Sophie Robinson, Director/Producer / So&So Pictures Ltd / sophie@soandsopictures.com / +44 7976 365 361 / https://www.soandsopictures. com/i-get-knocked-down I’m Free Now, You Are Free, directed by Ash Goh Hua Sales contact: Ash Goh Hua, hello@ashgohhua.com Indes galantes / Gallant Indies, directed by Philippe Béziat Sales contact: Alberto Alvarez Aguilera, Festival Manager / Pyramide International / alberto@pyramidefilms.com

In The Shadow Of 9/11, directed by Dan Reed Sales contact: Jonathan Ford, MD / Abacus Media / Jonathan@abacusmediarights.com / +447734 606 996 In The Space You Left, directed by Christine Saab Sales contact: Nicola Cowee, National Film and Television School / festivas2@nfts.co.uk Je m’appelle humain / Call Me Human, directed

by Kim O’Bomsawin Sales contact: Andrée-Anne Frenette, Terre Innue / andreeanne@terreinnue.com Jun, directed by Sel MacLean Sales contact: Sel MacLean, selmacleanfilm@gmail.com JUS SOLI, directed by somebody nobody Sales contact: Simon Jenkins, somebody nobody / simon.jenkins@somebodynobody.co.uk Juste un mouvement / Just a Movement, directed by Vincent Meessen Sales contact: François Rapaille, CBA / promo@cbadoc.be / +3222272234 Kalsubai, directed byYudhajit Basu Sales contact: Yudhajit Basu, ops.uturn@gmail.com King Rocker, directed by Michael Cumming Sales contact: James Nicholls, Krocker Film Ltd / james@firerecords.com Les prières de Delphine / Delphine’s Prayers, directed by Rosine Mbakam Sales contact: François Rapaille, CBA / promo@cbadoc.be / +3222272234 Les Sorcières de l’Orient / The Witches of the Orient, directed by Julien Faraut Sales contact: Bojana Marić, Lightdox / bojana@lightdox.com Letter From Your Far-Off Country, directed by Suneil Sanzgiri Sales contact: Suneil Sanzgiri, neil.sanzgiri@gmail.com 自由廣場 / Liberty Square, directed by Wood LIN Sales contact: Wood LIN, wood.tidf@gmail.com / Lift Like a Girl, directed by Mayye Zayed Sales contact: Mayye Zayed, Cleo Media / contact@cleo-media.com Looking for Langston, directed by Isaac Julien Sales contact: Manon Schwich, Isaac Julien Studio / manon@isaacjulien.com

In Posse, directed by Charlotte Jarvis Sales contact: Charlotte Jarvis, info@cjarvis.com / cjarvis.com

Lubiana Laibach, directed by Michael Pattison Sales contact: Michael Pattison, michael.pattison@idfilm.net

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Lydia Lunch – The War Is Never Over, directed by Beth B Sales contact: Beth B, Producer / B Productions / bethbprod@gmail.com / +19174945936 / www.bethbproductions.com Madness Remixed, directed by Rhea Storr Sales contact: Rhea Storr, r_storr@msn.com Maisie, directed by Lee Cooper Sales contact: Deborah Aston, Producer / deborahjaston@gmail.com Men Who Sing, directed by Dylan Williams Sales contact: Dylan Williams, dylan@ampfilm.se Mes chers espions / My Dear Spies, directed by Vladimir Léon Sales contact: Isabelle Vang, prod@sanosi-productions.com MINAMATA Mandala, directed by Kazuo Hara Sales contact: Hisami Kuroiwa, President / Media Space Inc / hkuroiwa1900@gmail.com / +19176646968 MITSUGU, directed by Ryuichi Ishikawa Sales contact: Takuma Nagao, Que Lindo / info@quelindo.jp MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name), directed by Tanu Muino, Lil Nas X Sales contact: UnderWonder Content, underwondercontent@gmail.com MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia, directed by Karen Pomer and Jane Mancini Sales contact: Karen Pomer, krpomer@gmail.com My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan, directed by Phil Grabsky, Shoaib Sharifi Sales contact: Peter Pas, Bomanbridge / peter@bomanbridge.tv Narciso em Férias / Narcissus Off Duty, directed by Ricardo Calil, Renato Terra Sales contact: Camila Leal Ferreira, Executive Production Coordinator / VideoFilmes Produções Artísticas LTDA / camila@videofilmes.com.br / +552130940810 NEGRUM3 / BLACKN3SS, directed by Diego Paulino Sales contact:Victor Casé, Reptilia Produções / victor. case@reptilia.art.br Niju no machi / Kotaichi no uta o amu / Double Layered Town / Making a Song to Replace Our Positions, directed by Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi Sales contact: Emi Ueyama, emi@articlefilms.com

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No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics, directed by Vivian Kleiman Sales contact: Jeffrey Winter, The Film Collaborative / jeffrey@thefilmcollaborative.org North By Current, directed by Angelo Madsen Minax Sales contact: Felix Endara, HARD FLOW / hardflowmedia@gmail.com, felix.endara@gmail.com Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra É Nossa! / Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land Is Our Land!, directed by Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero Sales contact: Roberto Romero, Director / roberomerojr@gmail.com / +55 31 991038805 Onder Het Witte Masker: De Film Die Haesaerts Had Kunnen Maken / Under The White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made, directed by Matthias De Groof Sales contact: María Vera, Festival Distributor, Kino Rebelde / distribution@kinorebelde.com / www.kinorebelde.com 一中 / One World One Dream, directed by CHUNG Chuan Sales contact: Wanying TSAI, Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute / wanying@tfai.org.tw 关于记忆 / On Memory, directed by Liao Jiekai Sales contact: Liao Jiekai, Prism Pictures / liaojk@yahoo.com O que Há em Ti / Brazil Is Thee Haiti Is (T)here, directed by Carlos Adriano Sales contact:Carlos Adriano, Babushka / adriano.carlos.ca@gmail.com Party Line, directed by Lydia Cornett Sales contact:Lydia Cornett / cornett.lydia@gmail.com / 4108024024 Portrait Of Kaye, directed by Ben Reed Sales contact: Hayley Williams, Executive Producer, Agile Films / hayley@agilefilms.com / +447835006267 / https://agilefilms.com/film Rancho, directed by Pedro Speroni Sales contact: Pedro Speroni / pedrosperoni87@gmail.com Raymonde el Bidaoia, directed by Yaël Abecassis Sales contact: Oded Horowitz, Panoroma Films LLC / oded.horowitz@gmail.com 昔日拼貼 / Resampling the Past, directed by Marco WILMS Sales contact: Wanying TSAI, Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, wanying@tfai.org.tw

Sales Contacts

回程列車 / Return, directed by HUANG Pang-chuan Sales contact: Natalia TREBIK, Le Fresnoy / NTrebik@lefresnoy.net

斷線風箏 / The Falling Kite, directed by HSIAO Mei-ling Sales contact: Philia CHENG, TOSEE PUBLISHER / philia@tosee.com.tw

RIP SENI, directed by Daisy Ifama Sales contact: Daisy Ifama, Lucy Owen / daisyifama@gmail.com, lucy.owen@bethlemgallery.com / +447873425447

The First 54 Years - An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation, directed by Avi Mograbi Sales contact: Théo Lionel, Festival Manager, The Film Party Sales / theo.lionel@thepartysales.com

. / Roses. Film-Cabaret, directed by Irena Stetsenko Sales contact: Esther van Messel, First Hand Films / esther.van.messel@firsthandfilms.com / +41 793351572

The Great Silence, directed by Allora & Calzadilla Sales contact: Julie Mouradian, Exhibitions & Loans, Galerie Chantal Crousel / galerie@crousel.com / +33 1 42 77 38 87 / www.crousel.com

Saudade, directed by Russell Adam Morton Sales contact: Russell Morton / russellmorton@me.com / +65 9649 2269

The Homecoming: A short film about Ajamu, directed by Topher Campbell Sales contact: Topher Campbell / topherartist@outlook.com

Sequence to a Dream, directed by Yasmin Nicholas Sales contact: Yasmin Nicholas / yasminnicholas@hotmail.co.uk

The Inheritance, directed by Ephraim Asili Sales contact: Ephraim Asili / effieasili@gmail.com

Shelly Belly inna Real Life, directed by Cecilia Bengolea Sales contact: Constance Chambers, Dayanis D&V Sales contact:John Hoskyns-Abrahall, Bullfrog Films / john@bullfrogfilms.com / 610-779-8226 / www.bullfrogfilms.com

The Nation’s Finest, directed by Keith Piper Sales contact: LUX, distribution@lux.org.uk

Tales from a Hard City, directed by Kim Flitcroft Sales contact: Alex Usborne, Picture Palace North / alex@picturepalacenorth.com / +44 114 249 3160

The Psychosis of Whiteness, directed by Eugene Nulman Sales contact: Eugene Nulman, psychosisofwhiteness@gmail.com

The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant, directed by Jim Finn Sales contact: Video Data Bank / distro@vdb.org / +1 312345 3550 / www.vdb.org The Ants and the Grasshopper, directed by Raj Patel, Zak Piper Sales contact: Tim Horsburgh, Kartemquin Educational Films / tim@kartemquin.com / +17734724366 / www.kartemquin.com The Attendant, directed by Isaac Julien Sales contact:Manon Schwich, Isaac Julien Studio / manon@isaacjulien.com The Battle of Denham Ford, directed by Rob Curry, Tim Plester Sales contact:Tim Plester, Fifth Column Films / film@fifthcolumn.org.uk The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory, directed by Sema Basharan Sales contact:Sema Basharan / semabasharan@outlook.com / +44 7950205779 / www.semabasharan.com

The People’s Account, directed by Menelik Shabazz Sales contact:Menelik Shabazz, meneliks@gmail.com

The Quintessence, directed by Pamela Breda Sales contact: Pamela Breda, breda.pamela@gmail.com / +393474483928 / www.bredapamela.com The Return, directed by Eriberto Gualinga Sales contact: Lindsay Poulton / The Guardian / lindsay.poulton@theguardian.com The Return: Life After ISIS, directed by Alba Sotorra Clua Sales contact: Vesna Cudic, MetFilm Sales / vesna@metfilm.co.uk / metfilmsales.com The Savior For Sale: The Story of the Salvator Mundi, directed by Antoine Vitkine Sales contact:Fionnuala Jamison, mk2 FILMS / intlsales@mk2.com The Story of Looking, directed by Mark Cousins Sales contact: Adam Dawtrey, Producer, Bofa Productions Limited / adam.dawtrey@btinternet.com / +44 7739 954106 / www.bofaproductions.com

The Elvermen, directed by Isla Badenoch Sales contact: Joe Binks, Producer / Glass Onion Films Ltd / joe@joebinks.com / +44 7702 014329

童年往事 / The Time to Live and the Time to Die, directed by Hsiao-Hsien HOU Sales contact: Mo Wu, Company Central Motion Picture Corp. / mo_wu@movie.com.tw

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The Troubled Mind, directed by Margaret Thomson Sales contact: Ros Cranston, BFI / Ros.Cranston@bfi.org.uk the words i do not have yet, directed by Phoebe Boswell Sales contact: Phoebe Boswell / phoebe_boswell@yahoo.co.uk

Uprising, directed by Steve McQueen, James Rogan Sales contact: BBC Studios / Sales.helpdesk@bbc.com Video Villanelle (for distance), directed by Catriona Gallagher Sales contact: Catriona Gallagher / catrionarosegallagher@gmail.com

They Won’t Call It Murder, directed by Melissa Gira Grant, Ingrid Raphael Sales contact: June Jennings, Field of Vision / june@fieldofvision.org / +14438343203

Wer wir waren / Who We Were, directed by Marc Bauder Sales contact: Bettina Morlock, Production Manager, Bauderfilm GmbH / bettina@bauderfilm.de / +49 163 441 75 69 / www.bauderfilm.de

此岸 一個家族故事 / This Shore: A Family Story, directed by Tzu-An WU Sales contact: Eric Chou / cs98h040@gmail.com

When We Were Bullies, directed by Jay Rosenblatt Sales contact: Matt Burke, Submarine / matt@submarine.com / https://www.submarine.com

This Stained Dawn, directed by Anam Abbas Sales contact:Anam Abbas / anamabbas@gmail.com / +923155053361 / https://www.othermemorymedia.com

where did we land, directed by Rabz Lansiquot Sales contact: Rabz Lansiquot / elansiquot@gmail.com

Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light, directed by Trevor Mathison & Edward George Sales contact:LUX / distribution@lux.org.uk Tictoc, directed by Mark Waters Sales contact: Katie McCullough, Festival Strategist, Festival Formula Ltd / submissions@festivalformula. com / +442038668935 / www.festivalformula.com Tvornice Radnicima / Factory to the Workers, directed by Srđan Kovačević Sales contact: Sabina Kresic / sabina.kresic@gmail.com Twilight City, directed by Black Audio Film Collective Sales contact:LUX / distribution@lux.org.uk Twin Peaks, directed by Al Wong Sales contact:Al Wong / redfan94103@yahoo.com / alwongart.com Two Minutes to Midnight, directed by Yael Bartana Sales contact: Anja Lindner / anja.lindner@yaelbartana.com, info@yaelbartana.com Two Sons and a River of Blood, directed by Amber Bemak, Angelo Madsen Minax Sales contact: Dustin Lawrence, Vtape / distribution@vtape.org Umbilic, directed by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona Sales contact: Natasha Thembiso Ruwona / Natasha.ruwona@yahoo.co.uk Un pays qui se tient sage / The Monopoly Of Violence, directed by David Dufresne Sales contact: Clémentine Hugot, Head Of Sales, The Bureau Sales / sales@lebureaufilms.com

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Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III - Micro Resistances, directed by Marwa Arsanios Sales contact: Sophie Delhasse, mor charpentier / contact@mor-charpentier.com / https://www.mor-charpentier.com Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, directed by Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler Sales contact: Sarah Kunstler / sarah@off-center.com Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$, directed by Karrabing Film Collective Sales contact: Elizabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective / https://karrabing.info Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams, directed by Karrabing Film Collective Sales contact: Elizabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective / https://karrabing.info Yek Tasveer, Do Bardasht / One Image, Two Acts, directed by Sanaz Sohrabi Sales contact:Sanaz Sohrabi, Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture / ssohra@saic. edu / +1 315 406 7477 / http://www.sanaz-sohrabi.com Yaõkwá, Imagem e Memória / Yaõkwá, Image and Memory, directed by Rita Carelli, Vincent Carelli Sales contact: Vincent Carelli, Vídeo nas Aldeias / olinda@videonasaldeias.org.br Zerua blu / Blue sky, directed by Lur Olaizola Lizarralde Sales contact: Lur Olaizola Lizarralde / lur.olai@gmail.com Zing Nim Sai Gaai / The World of Mindfulness, directed by Ying Liang Sales contact: Jeremy Chua, Pōtocol / jeremy@potocol.co

Sales Contacts

Festival Catalogue Information

In Sheffield

Our Films, Q&As, Talks, and Exhibitions programme will take place in Sheffield between 4 - 13 June. These events are open to Industry guests as well as the general public, with tickets available on a first come, first served basis. The Arts Programme Exhibitions and the DocFest Exchange programme are free and open to all. For in-person exhibitions, advanced booking is strongly advised. Please bring your own wired plugin headphones to view the artworks.

Due to COVID 19 restrictions, the festival will not be hosting any physical social events this year.

Films & Talks will take place at the following venues: Showroom Cinema / 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX Showroom Cinema 1 (90 seats, reduced to 24 seats) Showroom Cinema 2 (110 seats, reduced to 25 seats) Showroom Cinema 3 (180 seats, reduced to 45 seats) Showroom Cinema 4 (280 seats, reduced to 87 seats) 236

Abbeydale Picture House / 387 Abbeydale Rd, Nether Edge, Sheffield S7 1FS (351 seats, reduced to 103 seats) Available capacity in cinemas is subject to change Our Arts Programme Exhibitions will take place at the following venues: Site Gallery / 1 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS 11:00 - 18:00, Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 16:00, Sundays Closed Monday S1 Artspace / 1 Norwich Street, Park Hill Sheffield, S2 5PN 11:00 - 18:00, Monday - Sunday Sheffield Hallam University Performance Lab / Arundel Gate, Sheffield City Centre, Sheffield S1 2LQ 11:00 - 18:00, Monday - Sunday, closed Sun 13 June Sheffield DocFest 2021

Online

Films

Industry Talks

Access to our Official Selection is available online and includes films from all over the world, from across our competitions and strands: Opening and Closing Films, International Competition, UK Competition, Special Screenings, Into the World, Rebellions, Rhyme & Rhythm, Ghosts & Apparitions, Northern Focus, Retrospective and DocFest Exchange.

We will welcome speakers from all parts of the industry and from across the globe to discuss the current state of the sector and what the future may hold in our series of virtual panels and group discussions.

Industry guests can access the online programme through DocPlayer, which is available to Online Industry Passholders, internationally, from Friday 4 June until Sunday 13 June.

Public Talks

Passholders will receive an invitation to join DocPlayer by Thursday 3 June if registered before the festival. After this date, we will send out login details within 24 hours of your registration. DocPlayer access is non-transferable. If Sheffield DocFest has reason to believe you have shared your DocPlayer login with non-passholders, we reserve the right to revoke your access.

UK-based public audiences can access films from our Official Selection for 2021, along with live streamed talks and Q&As, through Sheffield DocFest Selects, our video on demand online festival: selects.sheffdocfest.com Selects will be available for booking from 12 May until 13 June, with most films becoming available to watch for a 72 hour window between 4 - 13 June, or until capacity is reached. Films will be released following the same schedule as their cinema screening in Sheffield.

The best web browser for both PC and Mac operating systems to access our website and online platforms is Google Chrome. It can be downloaded here: https://www.google.com/chrome/.

Join the livestream at the time of your chosen talk on DocPlayer.

A series of public talks will take place in Sheffield and online, with filmmakers and guests, to discuss works in the programme and a wide range of related topics.

All live streamed Talks can be watched on Sheffield DocFest Selects selects.sheffdocfest.com Talks in Sheffield (also live streamed): The BBC Interview with David Olusoga – Sat 5 June / 15:30 / Showroom Cinema 4 The Art of Staging Reality: Marc Isaacs in Conversation with Jon Bang Carlsen – Fri 11 June / 16:00 / Showroom Cinema 4 The Story of Looking: In Conversation with Mark Cousins – Sat 12 June / 14:00 / Abbeydale Picture House Pitches Our 2021 pitch competitions, The Whickers Pitch, Chicken & Egg Pictures (Egg)celerator Lab Pitch and WaterBear Pitch, will be available to all Industry passholders to watch.

Join the livestream at the time of your chosen Pitch on DocPlayer Online Exhibitions Platform Access to our Online Exhibitions is available at www. sheffdocfest.com from Friday 4 - Sunday 13 June, 24 hours a day.

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Festival Catalogue Information

In Cinemas across the UK

Safer Festival Policy

A selection from the following films will also screen simultaneously at partner cinemas across the UK: Summer of Soul (Friday 4 June), Lift Like a Girl (Saturday 5 June), My Name is Pauli Murray (Sunday 6 June), The First 54 Years (Friday 11 June), The Story of Looking (Saturday 12 June). Participating partner cinemas include: Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, BFI Southbank in London, Broadway in Nottingham, Chapter in Cardiff, City Varieties Music Hall (in partnership with Hyde Park Picturehouse) in Leeds, Duke of Yorks Picturehouse in Brighton, Eden Court Highlands in Inverness, FACT in Liverpool, Filmhouse in Edinburgh, Glasgow Film Theatre, HOME in Manchester, National Media Museum in Bradford, Phoenix in Exeter, Quad in Derby, Queens Film Theatre in Belfast, and Watershed in Bristol.

We aim to create a safe Festival, where we care and look out for each other.

For the latest information about participating venues, and films which will be screening, please visit www. sheffdocfest.com Audience Awards A number of the films are up for Awards – and our biggest jury is you, our audience! Please look out for information at our cinema screenings and online platforms on how to cast your vote for the Audience Award.

The Audience Award is supported by PBS America.

COVID-19 Safety Information We are working hard with our venue partners and the local authority to ensure that you are safe at our events.

To help us with this we ask that attendees follow the guidelines and procedures in place at each venue and respect instructions from staff and volunteers on site.

Venue capacities will be reduced and social distancing measures in place. Face coverings must be worn at all times indoors, unless exempt. All visitors must check in on arrival using the NHS Test & Trace QR code or provide their details to a member of staff, or they may be refused entry. Please do not attend any events if you are experiencing symptoms associated with COVID-19, however mild, or if you are awaiting a test result, or have been asked to self-isolate.

Any in person screenings, exhibitions and talks in Sheffield are subject to change in line with the UK government’s Coronavirus (COVID-19) guidelines, which are continually being reviewed.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the festival will not be hosting any physical social events this year.

Through the films we showcase and the talent we develop, we aim to celebrate difference, promote equality, and challenge injustice. We are committed to providing an environment that is welcoming, accessible, and inclusive for all audiences and all those who engage, and for all team members and volunteers. Harassment or harmful behaviour has no place at our festival or on any of our venues or online platforms. We are all responsible for our own actions, and we are all entitled to a safe positive experience.

By participating in DocFest events, in Sheffield and online, you agree to abide by and embrace our shared code of conduct. Anyone violating these principles will be asked to stop and are expected to comply immediately, and, at the discretion of the organisers, may be expelled from the activity, event or viewing (without refund).

For our full Safer Festivals Policy please visit https:// sheffdocfest.com/view/saferfestival If you observe or experience a violation of our code of conduct, please contact a member of DocFest staff, security personnel, or email: saferfestival@sheffdocfest.com Content Note & Self-Care Please note that some of the works in our Films and Arts programme may contain distressing subjects and scenes. We are also mindful that our audiences are watching these films in particularly distressing times and challenging environments. For this reason we recommend taking the time to read the synopsis for each film and look out for any content notes on our website. We have made every effort to be as transparent as possible about the content of our programme and welcome feedback on this.

If you, or anyone you know, has been affected by any of the content featured in our programme, you can find support and expert advice via the NHS website: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/mental-health-helplines/ Accessibility Sheffield DocFest is committed to providing a positive and inclusive experience for all, including those with disabilities and other access requirements.

To see an up-to-date list of relaxed screenings, fully and partially subtitled, dialogue-free and closed-captioned films and events, please visit our website at https:// sheffdocfest.com/attend/accessibility

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All live-streamed Talks will be captioned. Live captioning for our Talks programme is provided by AI Media.

For information on all our venues, including details of blue badge parking, wheelchair accessibility, wheelchair spaces, accessible toilets, and hearing loops, please visit https://sheffdocfest.com/attend/venues Sheffield DocFest is a breastfeeding friendly event, and those with babies should feel welcome to breastfeed at all our participating venues. Sheffield DocFest has partnered with Tinies Yorkshire to offer childcare services that come to you.

For any feedback and/or enquiries relating to accessibility and reasonable adjustments please email access@ sheffdocfest.com or call +44 ⓪114 276 5141.

The Fine Print: Festival Catalogue The Festival Catalogue is a complete listing of our 2021 programme and is also available for download from our Industry DocPlayer platform, under the Delegate Resources section.

Most Up to Date Information All information is correct at the time of publication.

Sheffield DocFest reserves the right to add and remove content and make changes and updates. Please visit sheffdocfest.com for current listings.

Contact Information T: +44 [0]114 276 5141 E: info@sheffdocfest.com Sheffield DocFest office hours are 09:30–17:30 BST For the most up-to-date announcements, follow us on on our social media channels: Facebook: /sheffdocfest Twitter: @sheffdocfest Instagram: @sheffdocfest #SheffDocFest2021 Sign up to our enews on our website www.sheffdocfest.com International Documentary Festival Sheffield (Sheffield DocFest) is a charitable incorporated organisation with registered charity number: 1184849

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Festival Catalogue Information

Staff & Contributors

Trustees

Alex Cooke, Chair Brian Woods, Deputy Chair Derren Lawford Helen Scott Jo Clinton-Davis Madonna Benjamin Peter Armstrong Shirani Sabaratnam Diana Buckley (Sheffield City Council observer) Sue Cook (Arts Council England observer)

We thank those who served as Trustees until recently

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Patrick Holland (September 2016 - April 2021) Sharna Jackson (December 2017 - June 2020)

Team

Direction

Arts Programme

Cíntia Gil (Festival Director) Melanie Iredale (Deputy Director) Patrick Hurley (Director of Industry) Sylvia Bednarz (Director of Partnerships & Development)

Herb Shellenberger (Arts Programme Curator) Soukaina Aboulaoula (Arts Programme Virtual Exhibition Curator) Hannah Campbell (Arts Programme Producer) Oliver Roberts (Arts Programme Production Coordinator) Anna Titov (Arts Programme Assistant)

Film Programme Retrospective Guest Curators Anthony Andrews & Teanne Andrews (We Are Parable) Campbell X David Olusoga George Amponsah Judah Attille Karen Alexander Mark Sealy Selection and Film Programming

Industry Programme Patrick Hurley (Director of Industry) Manon Euler (Industry Programme Producer) Harry Løvstrøm (Arts Talent Market Producer) Sophie Duncan (Industry Programme Assistant) Juliet Moore (Broadcast Production Talent Market Coordinator) Mathy Selvakumaran (International Delegations Assistant)

Agnès Wildenstein (Associate Programmer) Cíntia Gil Melanie Iredale (UK Competition, Rhyme & Rhythm) Rabz Lansiquot (Rebellions, Ghosts & Apparitions) Carlos Pereira (Selection Committee) Christopher Small (Selection Committee) Juliano Gomes (Selection Committee) Qila Gill (Selection Committee) Rachel Pronger (Previewer Tomás Baltazar (Previewer) Manon Euler (Selection for Northern Focus) Mita Suri (Film Programme Producer and selection for Northern Focus) Owen Jones (Film Programme Coordinator and selection for Northern Focus) Jamie Allan (DocFest Exchange Film Programme) Carol Nahra (Programme Consultant for the UK) Jeremy Chua (Programme Consultant for Southeast Asia & China) Jonathan Ali (Programme Consultant for the Caribbean) 水 / Yu Shimizu (Programme Consultant for Japan) Dora McKay (Film Programme Assistant)

Community Programme

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Staff & Contributors

Laura Hegarty (Community Programme Producer) Anthea Okereke (Community Programme Coordinator) Jamie Allan (DocFest Exchange Programmer) Communications, Partnerships, Press & Publications Sylvia Bednarz (Director of Partnerships & Development) James Mullighan (Partnerships Executive) Emma McCorkell (UK Press Officer) Gloria Zerbinati (International Press Officer) Sarah Leech (Digital Communications Producer) Ralf Webb (Catalogue & Publications Editor) Matt Turner (Assistant Catalogue & Publications Editor) Eleni Stavrou (Communications Assistant)

Design & Rebrand Regular Practice: Tom Finn (Director) Kristoffer Sølling (Director) Christopher Winter (Designer) Julia Luckmann (Designer) Shawn Sawyers (Designer) Connor Campbell (Motion Designer)

Reece Walton Ruby Cawley Shoaib Ahmad The Sheffield DocFest team would like to thank the following for their support

Alex Joyce Alex Gittins Blake Hutton Bradley Weatherhead Caitlin Jones Carolyn Mcilvenny Declan Lindley Elizabeth Starr Emmanuel Masvinu Imogen Cooper Isabel Simpson Jak-Luke Sharp Jamie Calland Maya Kuzina Owen Herman Phoebe Grana Rachael Bratton

Aaron Kelly (Site Gallery) Adrian Kawaley-Lathan (Bertha Foundation) Agathe Morisse (Institut français du Royaume-Uni} Alex Dixon (Barnsley College) Alice Butler (AEMI) Alice Duggan (Leeds International Film Festival) Alice Lea (LUX) Aline Dolinh Alison Turner (Jurys Inn) Alyona Bocharova (Beat Films) Andy Ruston (Sheffield City Council) Anja Dziersk (Rise And Shine World Sales) Angelina Abel (Mulembas d’Africa) Antonella Bonfanti (Pacific Film Archive) Ayman El Amir Ben Lomas (Hawsons Chartered Accountants) Ben Luxford (British Film Institute) Ben Roberts (British Film Institute) Bill Allard (Sound of Music) Boris Nelepo Carmen Thompson (Africa in Motion / We Are Parable) Catherine Willerton (Marsh Commercial) Cecilia Barrionuevo Chantelle Boyea (British Film Institute) Dr Charles Mundye (Sheffield Hallam University) Charmian Griffin (Artangel) Dr Chi-Yun Shin (Sheffield Hallam University) Chris Harris (True Story) Christoph Terhechte (Dok Leipzig) Colin Morgan (Red61) Colin Pons (Sheffield Hallam University) Corinna Reicher (British Film Institute) Dan Bates (Crucible Theatre) Danae Wellington (Nyara Arts Sheffield) Daniel Fitzpatrick (AEMI) Daniel Hui Danny Horan (Channel 4) David Gilbert (Bloc Projects) Deborah Egan (DINA) Delphine Lievens (Gower Street Analytics) Diane Gabrysiak (Institut français duRoyaume-Un) Diego Pino-Anguita (Conecta - Chile) Digna van Nielen (Fiona Festival) Dion Hanson (The Projected Pictures Trust) Dominic Jaeckle Eduardo Valente Edward Highfield (Sheffield City Council) Elhum Shakerifar Elle Stocks (S1 Artspace) Emma France (Marketing Sheffield) Dr Emmie McFadden (Sheffield Hallam University) Eoin Dara (Dundee Contemporary Arts) Geff Green (Sheffield Hallam University) Graham Relton (Yorkshire and North East Film Archive)

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Sheffield DocFest: Eleni Stavrou (Coordination) Website Design Joi Polloi Sian Gilbert (Digital Producer) James Briggs (Lead Designer) Marcus Williams (Developer) Julian Higman (Developer) Russell Stearman (Technical Director) Access, Operations, Production Mat Steel (Head of Production & Operations) Maria Stoneman (Head of HR & Participation (Maternity Leave)) Ellie Irwin (Operations & Access Producer) Nigel Fischer (Talks & Digital Producer) Greg Walker (Production Manager) Vicki Rolley (Box Office & Front of House Manager) Corrigan Lowe (Administrative & Executive Assistant) Lee Bentham (Operations Assistant) Miranda Mungai (Talks Programme Assistant) Jim Dummett (Digital Print Management, Cinebox) Nick Randles (Digital Print Transport, Cinebox) Finance Fiona Outram (Finance Manager) Cassie Fletcher (Assistant Accountant) Festival Assistants

Hazel McKenna Heejung Oh (Seesaw Pictures) Holly Wong Ian Wild (Showroom Cinema) Jane Tompkins (Marketing Sheffield) Janet Browse (Sheffield Mind) Jac Evans (Red61) Jack Brown Jack Howe (DINA) James Oliver (Longley Park Sixth Form) Jean-Pierre Rehm Jerome Grelet (Novotel Sheffield) Jessie Yang (Taiwan Docs) Jim Dummett (Cinebox) Jim Wraith (Sheffield Hallam University) João Salaviza Joe Cutts Jon Friend (Sheffield Mind) Jon Shibata (Pacific Film Archive) Jonathan Childs (Sheffield Hallam University) José Ferrens (Red61) Judith Ennis (Sheffield Music Hub) Judith Harry (Site Gallery) Judith Nichol (BBC) Katayoun Dibamehr (Festival du Nouveau Cinéma) Katie Ellen (British Film Institute Kathryn Gomm Marsh Commercial Kerry Campbell Site Gallery Kirill Sorokin Beat Film Festival / Beat Films) Lawrie Simanowitz (Bates Wells) Louise Hutchinson (S1 Artspace) Lucia Salas Lucy Cheesman (SONA) Lucy McDowell (Wellcome) Luís Urbano Luisa Golob (Ignite Imaginations) Lynne Sachs Maeve Armstrong (Red61) Mandy Chang (BBC Storyville) Marc Isaacs Marek Hovorka (Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival) Maria Miguel Ferreira María Vera (Kino Rebelde Mark Cordin (Unite Students) Mark Mackercher (Red61) Mark Mobbs (Marketing Sheffield) Mark Riddington (Abbeydale Picture House) Mattijs Wouter Knol Maui Alena Mia Bays (Birds Eye View) Miguel Ribeiro Mo Wu (Central Motion Picture Corporation) Muna McAdie (Balanced Grace) Nick Randles (Cinebox) Nico Marzano Nina Numankadic (DA Films) Nuno Rodrigues (Curtas Vila do Conde) Oona Mosna (Media City Film Festival) Pamela Johnson

Rebecca Bell (Site Gallery) Rebecca Maddox (Sheffield City Council) Renée Nader Messora Rita Daniels (Channel 4) Rodolfo Castillo Morales Roland van Putten (Fiona Festival) Rosie Thompson (Site Gallery) Rui Moreira Sacha Mirzoeff (Channel 4) Sam Holland Page Hall Festival / Migration Matters) Samantha Jagger Sarah Leahy (The University of Newcastle) Simon Bladen (Hawsons Chartered Accountants) Simon Field Stefan Kloos (Rise and Shine World Sales) Stephanie Prior Tchiyiwe Chihana Tito Rodriguez (Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales - Spain) Toni Bell (Looky Looky Pictures) Tony Tabatznik (Bertha Foundation) Val Regan (Out Aloud) Varadila Nurdin (Docs By The Sea / In-Docs) Vicente Moreira Vicky Halsall (Showroom Cinema) Vicky Morris (Hive) Warda Yassin (Mixing Roots) Will Rose (Pavilion) Wood LIN (Taiwan International Documentary Festival) Yvon Langue (Untitled Duo) Dr Yvonne Battle-Felton (Sheffield Hallam University)

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We would also like to thank all at the following organisations Cinema For All Doc Society Heeley City Farm Into Film Joi Polloi Lai Yin Association Reach South Sheffield The Rectory Projects Regather Sheffield SAGE Greenfingers SAYiT Sheffield Culture Consortium Shift72 Showroom Workstation SOAR Sheffield DocFest would also like to thank all those who have donated in the last year to help support our charitable objectives, and all of the filmmakers, artists and producers who each contributed to an official selection we are proud to present.

Thanks to our Funders, Sponsors & Partners

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Major Funders, Sponsors and Partners

Funders, Sponsors and Partners

Media Partners

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Index

Films

Film Title “The red filter is withdrawn.”/” 9/11: One Day in America A Short History of Decay / 概 Ali and His Miracle Sheep Alive All Light, Everywhere All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes Alone Together Alvorada Palace / Alvorada Amine Ancient Sunshine Aphorisms of the Lake / Aforismos del Lago Avec Sonia Wieder-Atherton Babymother Barataria Batería Before the Guests Arrive BLACKN3SS / NEGRUM3 Blacks Britannica 246

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Director(s)

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Minjung Kim Daniel Bogado LIN Shih-chieh Maythem Ridha Makeda Matheson Theo Anthony Haig Aivazian Bradley & Pablo Anna Muylaert, Lo Politi Beverley Bennett Jason Livingston Humberto González Bustillo Chantal Akerman Julien Henriques Julie Nguyen Van Qui Damian Sainz Jon Bang Carlsen Diego Paulino David Koff

129 65 131 49 50 118 117 100 73 175 94 143 112 164 126 161 146 160 157

Sheffield DocFest 2021

BLONDIE: VIVIR EN LA HABANA Blood Ah Go Run Bloom Blue sky / Zerua blu BMB (Black, Muslim and Bi) Borderland / Grenzland Brazil Is Thee Haiti Is (T)here / O que Há em Ti Bruce Takes Dragon Town Burning an Illusion Call Me Human / Je m’appelle humain Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight CAUGHT / CAER Charm Circle Chelas nha Kau Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1) Cold Stack Courage Day in the Life Dear Elnaz / Elnaz Jan Delphine’s Prayers / Les prières de Delphine Don McCullin: Almost Liverpool 8 Double Layered Town / Kotaichi no uta o amu Drawings of my BF E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo Equatorial Constellations Everything Factory to the Workers / Tvornice Radnicima Fetish Fi Dem Fi Dem II Fi Dem III Final Account Firestarter - The Story of Bangarra Fixed barricade at Hamdalaye crossing / Barrage d’arrêt fixe et fermé au niveau du carrefour Hamdalaye From the 84 Days / Aus den 84 Tagen From the Wild Sea / Fra det vilde hav Gallant Indies / Indes galantes Golden Flask / Auksinis Flakonas Gorbachev. Heaven / Горбачев. Рай Growing Love GUNDA Hanging On Harley Queen Haydee and the Flying Fish / Haydee y el Pez Volador Homage to the work of Philip Henry Gosse / Homenaje a la obra de Philip Henry Gosse Homes for the People Horvath How to Invent Reality I Get Knocked Down I’m Free Now, You Are Free If god were a woman / Si dios fuera mujer In Posse In The Shadow Of 9/11 In The Space You Left It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum It’s Now or Never Jun JUS SOLI 247

Rob Roth Menelik Shabazz, Imruh Caesar A.T., Journal du Pôle Lur Olaizola Lizarralde Heidi (Jade) Ramírez Andreas Voigt Carlos Adriano Emily Chao Menelik Shabazz Kim O’Bomsawin Nick Green Nicola Mai Nira Burstein Bagabaga Studios, Bataclan 1950 Mitch McCabe Frank Martin Aliaksei Paluyan Karrabing Film Collective Mania Akbari Rosine Mbakam Daniel Draper, Allan Melia Komori Haruka + Seo Natsumi James Cooper Lynne Sachs Silas Tiny David OReilly Srđan Kovačević Topher Campbell Zinzi Minott Zinzi Minott Zinzi Minott Luke Holland Nel Minchin, Wayne Blair Thomas Bauer

113 172 162 126 161 75 84 119 168 102 69 51 39 86 88 52 86 213 87 76 53 42 108 89 40 211 47 163 166 167 169 74 101 83

Philipp Hartmann Robin Petré Philippe Béziat Jurgis Matulevicius, Paulius Anicas Vitaly Mansky Claire Davies Victor Kossakovsky Alfie Barker Carolina Adriazola, José Luis Sepúlveda Pachi Bustos Pablo Martin Weber

37 212 101 124 74 147 212 147 230 230 79

Kay Mander Jim Wraith Jon Bang Carlsen Sophie Robinson Ash Goh Hua Angélica Cervera Charlotte Jarvis Dan Reed Christine Saab Stuart Hall Jon Bang Carlsen Sel MacLean somebody nobody

135 148 146 148 90 71 127 75 54 158 146 149 172

Index

Just a Movement / Juste un mouvement Kalsubai King Rocker Letter From Your Far-Off Country Liberty Square / 廣場 Lift Like a Girl / ‫نتباك اي شاع‬ Looking for Langston Los Reyes Lubiana Laibach Lydia Lunch – The War Is Never Over Madness Remixed Maisie Men Who Sing Microcosmos MINAMATA Mandala MITSUGU MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) MOVE: Confrontation in Philadelphia My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan My Dear Spies / Mes chers espions My Name is Pauli Murray Narcissus Off Duty / Narciso em Férias Night Shot / Visión Nocturna No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics North By Current Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: This Land Is Our Land!

Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm: Essa Terra É Nossa!

On Memory / 关于 忆 One Image, Two Acts One World One Dream / 一中 Party Line Portrait Of Kaye Rancho Raymonde el Bidaoia Redemption Song: Episode 1 - Iron in the Soul Redemption Song: Episode 7 - Shades of Freedom Resampling the Past / 昔日拼 Return / 回 列 RIP SENI Riverock / É Rocha e Rio, Negro Leo Roses. Film-Cabaret / Рози. Фільм-кабаре Saudade / Saudade Second Coming Seeking Aline / À la recherche d’Aline Rokhaya Sequence to a Dream Shelly Belly inna Real Life Sing, Freetown Something Nice to Eat Something Said SON CHANT Songs For The River Soy Cubana Splinters / Esquirlas Stationary Peaceful Protest Stormskater Summer / ЛЕТО Summer of Soul Super Sam Surviving 9/11 (Working Title) Symbiotic Earth Tales from a Hard City 248

Vincent Meessen Yudhajit Basu Michael Cumming Suneil Sanzgiri Wood LIN Mayye Zayed Isaac Julien Bettina Perut, Iván Osnovikoff Michael Pattison Beth B Rhea Storr Lee Cooper Dylan Williams Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou Kazuo Hara Ryuichi Ishikawa Tanu Muino, Lil Nas X Karen Pomer and Jane Mancini Phil Grabsky, Shoaib Sharifi Vladimir Léon Betsy West, Julie Cohen Ricardo Calil, Renato Terra Carolina Moscoso Vivian Kleiman Angelo Madsen Minax Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, Roberto Romero Liao Jiekai Yek Tasveer, Do Bardasht, Sanaz Sohrabi CHUNG Chuan Lydia Cornett Ben Reed Pedro Speroni Yaël Abecassis Jenny Barraclough Jenny Barraclough Marco Wilms HUANG Pang-chuan Daisy Ifama Paula Gaitán Irena Stetsenko Russell Adam Morton debbie tucker green Marieme Balde Yasmin Nicholas Cecilia Bengolea Clive Patterson Sarah Erulkar Jay Bernard Vivian Ostrovsky Charlotte Ginsborg Jeremy Ungar, Ivaylo Getov Natalia Garayalde Xhosa Cole, Shiyi Li Guen Murroni Vadim Kostrov Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson Sandi Hudson-Francis Arthur Cary John Feldman Kim Flitcroft Sheffield DocFest 2021

87 141 102 144 136 105 178 230 137 106 55 106 107 213 76 139 162 91 66 41 77 85 230 109 122 43 138 144 132 72 56 44 110 181 181 132 133 57 93 110 142 174 141 165 99 66 135 173 111 58 114 80 156 104 45 34 154 67 214 149

The Annotated Field Guide of Ulysses S. Grant The Ants and the Grasshopper The Attendant The Battle of Denham Ford The Black Safari The Branches are Hope; The Roots are Memory The Elvermen The Falling Kite / 斷 The First 54 Years The Great Conflict, Brixton Riots & Other Films The Great Silence The Homecoming: A short film about Ajamu The Inheritance The Mangrove Nine The Monopoly Of Violence / Un pays qui se tient sage The Nation’s Finest The Other One / El Otro The People’s Account The Psychosis of Whiteness The Quintessence The Return The Return: Life After ISIS The Savior For Sale: The Story of the Salvator Mundi The silence of the Mole / El silencio del Topo The Story of Looking The Time to Live and the Time to Die / 年往事 The Troubled Mind The Whisper of the Leaves / El Susurro de Las Hojas The White Death of the Black Wizard / A Morte Branca do Feiticeiro Negro The Witches of the Orient / Les Sorcières de l’Orient the words i do not have yet The World of Mindfulness / Zing Nim Sai Gaai The Year of the White Moon / God Beloi Luni They Won’t Call It Murder This Shore: A Family Story / 此岸：一個家族故事 This Stained Dawn Three Songs on Pain, Time and Light Tictoc Tomorrow We’ll See / Domani si vedrà Twilight City Twin Peaks Two Minutes to Midnight Two Sons and a River of Blood Umbilic Under The White Mask: The Film That Haesaerts Could Have Made / Onder Het Witte Masker: De Film Die Haesaerts Had Kunnen Maken Uprising Video Villanelle (for distance) When We Were Bullies A Pandemic Poem: WHERE DID THE WORLD GO? where did we land White on White / Bílá na Bílé Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part III - Micro Resistances Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America Who We Were Windjarrameru, The Stealing C*nt$ Wutharr, Saltwater Dreams Yaõkwá, Image and Memory / Yaõkwá, Imagem e Memória 249

Jim Finn Raj Patel, Zak Piper Isaac Julien Rob Curry, Tim Plester Colin Luke Sema Basharan Isla Badenoch HSIAO Mei-ling Avi Mograbi Clovis Salmon aka ‘Sam the Wheels’ Allora & Calzadilla Topher Campbell Ephraim Asili Franco Rosso David Dufresne Keith Piper Francisco Bermejo Menelik Shabazz Eugene Nulman Pamela Breda Eriberto Gualinga Alba Sotorra Clua Antoine Vitkine Anais Taracena Mark Cousins Hsiao-Hsien HOU Margaret Thomson Amir Aether Valen Rodrigo Ribeiro

95 214 163 59 156 150 60 133 77 153 215 163 96 180 93 177 230 168 157 62 61 78 78 96 34 134 135 129 130

Julien Faraut Phoebe Boswell Ying Liang Maxim Pechersky Melissa Gira Grant, Ingrid Raphaël Tzu-An WU Anam Abbas Trevor Mathison & Edward George Mark Waters Lorenzo Vitrone Black Audio Film Collective Al Wong Yael Bartana Amber Bemak, Angelo Madsen Minax Natasha Thembiso Ruwona Matthias De Groof

103 177 70 123 92 134 46 176 150 71 173 120 89 121 160 140

Steve McQueen, James Rogan Catriona Gallagher Jay Rosenblatt Brian Hill Rabz Lansiquot Viera Čákanyová Marwa Arsanios Emily Kunstler, Sarah Kunstler Marc Bauder Karrabing Film Collective Karrabing Film Collective Rita Carelli and Vincent Carelli

67 151 125 65 166 38 215 81 216 213 213 128

Index

Arts

Artist Name

Title of Work

Page

Al Wong Alex Tyson Anuj Malhotra Areej Huniti & Eliza Goldox Ash Moniz AWU Radio Basir Mahmood Bassam Al-Sabah Bassam Al-Sabah Charlotte Jarvis Daïchi Saïto David Haxton Deborah Findlater Deborah Findlater Duncan Marquiss Duncan Marquiss Emily Chao Emily Chao Emily Chao Geraldine Snell Geraldine Snell Geraldine Snell Gian Spina Heesoo Kwon Heesoo Kwon Himali Singh Soin Julie Ramage Karim Kattan & Yasmine Benabdallah Les Bonnes Ondes Lina Laraki Mohammad Shawky Hassan Mona Benyamin Pallavi Paul Sam Smith Seamus Harahan Sophie Michael Tabita Rezaire The School of Mutants Wanja Kimani Yasmina Reggad Zara Zandieh

Same Difference The Registry Yeh Woh (Turmoil) The DIDO Problem Joules Trans-Temporal Echoes Sunsets, everyday Fenced within the silent cold walls Familiar Scenes That Refuse to Stay In Posse earthearthearth Painting Room Lights Rituals Nazar (bad energy stay far away) Contact Call Mirror Test As Long As There is Breath No Land chive pockets Dancing Still Life Moving light love On Time A Ritual for Metamorphosis Premolt static range How to order online Sundown Conversations Make Time The Last Observer And on a Different Note Moonscape The Blind Rabbit E.1027 There’s A Weight On You But You Can’t Feel It Rabbit Hole Ancestrales The School of Mutants borrowed intimacy Ritounelle Octavia’s Visions

204 206 186 198 198 207 186 187 187 207 187 188 188 188 189 189 205 205 205 189 189 189 199 190 190 207 190 207 207 199 200 200 201 191 191 192 202 201 192 207 202

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Events, Talks & Workshops

Title of Event

Page

BAFTA Masterclass: Betsy West & Julie Cohen BBC Interview: David Olusoga Between Reminiscence and Reactivation: a collective reflection Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club Beyond Story: A Conversation for the Industry (II) BFI Doc Society and FWD-Doc present: Reimagining Disability in Documentary Chicken & Egg Pictures’ 2021 (Egg)celerator Lab Pitch Docs Online Emily Chao & Al Wong in Conversation EU-UK Co-productions After Brexit Female Gaze Fire and Land: Ritualistic Movement & Spirituality First Cut: The Top Tips “How to perform (in) a crisis: Geraldine Snell & Mohamed Abdelkarim” Journalism & Creative Documentary Know Your Rights: Bullying and Discrimination in the Workplace Learning from the More-Than-Human: Audio Walk and Online Workshop Learning How to Live Together: A Symbiotic Worldview Making My First Film Notes From the Field: working strategies for non-fiction artists Punching Through In Primetime: Elevating Diversity Reframing our Desires Sanctuary of the Sensuous: Audio Walk and Online Workshop with Foresta Collective Seeds for a Common Future Sister: Sistah - The Erasure of the Dark-Skinned Black Woman in Mainstream Media So Real it Hurts: In Conversation with Lydia Lunch Solidarity Forever: Community Organising and Creative Disruption Sonic Register: Black British Womxn and On-screen Performativity Soundtracking Streets - Found Sounds and Impromptu Music Story of Looking: In Conversation with Mark Cousins Stories of Other Animals Storytelling as Collective Resistance.

Tell Your Story with ITV Studios The Art of Staging Reality: Marc Isaacs in Conversation with Jon Bang Carlsen The Case for Documentary Funding The Return: Life After Isis - reframing the narrative The Whickers Award Ceremony The Whickers Pitch UK Commissioners: Looking Ahead WaterBear Pitch We are family: The Special Bond of Singing When We Click: Making Music Even When We’re Not Together Who are ‘We’? Global and Local Visions Whose Voice? Whose Story?

Working with ESPN Working With National Geographic Working With Sky Working with the BFI National Archive Working with UKTV

225 224 224 218 227 228 227 228 224 228 227 221 226 225 227 227 217 219 226 224 227 225 217 218 221 225 221 225 221 225 218 219 228 225 226 225 228 227 227 229 220 220 110 229 228 229 229 226 228

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Still sourced from ‘Your Next Move’ 1981, 12:27.

By Martin John Harris and David Falconer Rea. Courtesy of Yorkshire Film Archive.