Soft Fruit intro w/ Sneha Solanki

Introduction to Rehana Zaman's Soft Fruit by artist and educator, Sneha Solanki, currently a PhD Candidate (Fine Art and School of Geography, Politics & Sociology) at Newcastle University.Soft FruitDirector: Rehana ZamanCountry: United KingdomYear: 2026Filmed in Angus, Scotland, Soft Fruit follows migrant seasonal workers on an industrial berry farm as they pick, prepare and transport crops. Candid conversations and scenes of rebellious, collective gathering appear alongside observational footage in shifting visual formats – from high-definition video to 16mm, and CGI inspired by medieval Islamic cosmography – building a layered sense of time and place.Follow the link for more information >>>

A pre-screening introduction from artist Cannach MacBride, exploring the themes of the films Q-LoXXX by Mika Sorzano, and All Good Medicine by T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss.The films screened as part of the BFMAF Queer Care programme, curated and facilitated by LGBTQIA+ artists Cannach MacBride, Conal McStravck, and Mikki.Q-LoXXXDirector: Nika SorzanoCountry: The NetherlandsYear: 2026Developed through collaboration with queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants connected to Papaya Kuir, this project blends Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with aspects of queer resistance practice and theory. Through role play, fabulation, writing and collage, participants collectively imagined Q-LoXXX—a speculative utopia shaped by queer ghosts—whilst handmade scenography and props gave form to a transformative space for world-making and documentation.All Good Medicine – Kon-a-wai Kloshe La-mes-tinDirector: T’uy’t’tanat Cease WyssCountry: CanadaYear: 1993Two West Coast Women, Cease Nahanee Wyss and Jo Spaxman, discuss a range of North American herbs, and their uses in treating common ailments. Interwoven into this self-help style video is a legend about the creation sacred healing herbs.Follow the link for more information >>>

An introduction to Shari Filot's Back Nations / Queer Nations? from Trini-Irish anti-disciplinary practitioner, Clodagh Assata Boyce.Black Nations / Queer Nations?Director: Shari FrilotCountry: United StatesYear: 1995Documenting the landmark 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora, Shari Frilot’s seminal film captures a charged gathering of scholars, artists, and activists in dialogue. Through the voices of Essex Hemphill, Urvashi Vaid, Isaac Julien, and M. Jacqui Alexander and others, it crystallises a pivotal moment in diasporic queer history – interrogating Black and queer identity, media production, homophobia, and the contested terrain of Black nationalism.Follow the link for more information >>>

An introduction from producer and curator Ben Cook to BFMAF26 Focus programme, Mohaiemen + Sagar, exploring the work of Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar .The programme is supported by Midnight’s Third Child through the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme.Follow the links for more information on each of these programmes:Mohaiemen + Sagar 1 >>>Mohaiemen + Sagar 2 >>>Mohaiemen + Sagar 3 >>>

Q&A following a screening of Shari Frilot's Black Nations / Queer Nations?, facilitated by Clodagh Assata Boyce, a Trini-Irish anti-disciplinary practitioner based in Dublin.Black Nations / Queer Nations?Director: Shari FrilotCountry: United StatesYear: 1995Documenting the landmark 1995 conference on lesbian and gay sexualities in the African diaspora, Shari Frilot’s seminal film captures a charged gathering of scholars, artists, and activists in dialogue. Through the voices of Essex Hemphill, Urvashi Vaid, Isaac Julien, and M. Jacqui Alexander and others, it crystallises a pivotal moment in diasporic queer history – interrogating Black and queer identity, media production, homophobia, and the contested terrain of Black nationalism.⁠Follow the link for more information >>>

Q&A with musician Jesse Rae & filmmaker Marco J Federici, following a screening of Be Yersel! (Almost Ma Sel Again) – a work-in-progress documentary portrait of Jesse. Be Yersel! (Almost Ma Sel Again)Director: Marco J FedericiCountry: ScotlandYear: 2026A kilted warrior crowns the New York skyline in this joyous tribute to Jesse Rae, a musician from the Scottish Borders who plugged into the electric current of Parliament-Funkadelic. From bringing 80s NYC to a standstill atop the Brooklyn Bridge to shaping seminal hits like Inside Out, Rae fused tartan swagger with transatlantic groove to craft a mythic, pluralist vision of Scotland in the key of funk!Jesse Rae (born 1951) is a Scottish singer, songwriter, and composer from St Boswells known for blending funk and synth-pop with overt expressions of Scottish heritage. After moving to the United States in 1974 to join the band Granicus, he shifted towards funk songwriting and production, achieving major success as the writer of Odyssey’s 1982 chart-topping hit “Inside Out.” In the 1980s he released solo work, including The Thistle (1987), collaborating with musicians from the Parliament-Funkadelic orbit to develop his eccentric “Caledonian funk” style. Famous for performing in Highland battle dress with a claymore sword, Rae later ran as an independent candidate in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election.Follow the link for more information >>>

Part 3 of a BFMAF screening and conversation series between filmmakers Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar, facilitated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle. Films discussed include:DaduDirector: Molla SagarCountry: BangladeshYear: 2017An intimate, observational portrait of Momin Ali Mridha, a centenarian and long-time model at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka University. Through his reflections on politics, religion, class, creativity, and human kindness the film blooms into a luminous meditation on the shifting character of Bangladesh and the beauty of everyday life.GraceDirector: Naeem MohaiemenCountry: United StatesYear: 2024Grace emerges from Naeem Mohaiemen’s collaboration with Maine resident Karen Wentworth, the second person in the state to legally secure medicine for a dignified end-of-life process. Documenting her daily routines, the film offers a tender and hopeful reflection on autonomy and mortality while posing the question: What does it mean to accept a body’s decline?Follow the link for more information >>>

Part 2 of a BFMAF screening and conversation series between filmmakers Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar, facilitated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle. Films discussed include:Bhobar VitaDirector: Molla SagarCountry: BangladeshYear: 2025Born as twins in the heart of Dhaka in 1925, two lives are slowly unstitched by he Partition of 1947 that carves a border across Bengal. Across multiple perspectives, Bhobar Vita drifts through the fractured geographies of the old city, tracing how displacement seeps into art, the persistence of memory, and how home endures as both wound and inheritance.A Missing Can of FilmDirector: Naeem MohaiemenCountries: Bangladesh, United Kingdom, United StatesYear: 2025Mohaiemen traces the rumour of an unfinished film concealed in a can of flour, circling the memory of Zahir Raihan – a communist filmmaker and public intellectual who disappeared in the aftermath of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Intercutting fragments of Raihan’s work with footage shot at the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation after the 2024 Student Uprising, he probes the political architecture of the archive, where analog ghosts persist, flickering at the inflection point of digital amnesia.Follow the link for more information >>>

Part 1 of a BFMAF screening and conversation series between filmmakers Naeem Mohaiemen and Molla Sagar, facilitated by Dr Sanghita Sen, Assistant Professor in Film, Department of Arts, Northumbria University, Newcastle. Films discussed include:SirenDirector: Molla SagarCountry: BangladeshYear: 2012Once hailed as “golden fibre,” jute bound field to factory, sustaining millions across Bengal. This film bears witness to its slow unravelling – from colonial boom to post-independence nationalisation, and the brutal retrenchments of the 1980s that shuttered mills and cast workers adrift. In the shadow of the closures at Khalishpur in Khulna, Siren listens to the aftershocks: hunger, dispossession, and the quiet terror of futures collapsing into silence.Abu Ammar is ComingDirector :Naeem MohaiemenCountries: Bangladesh, Lebanon, United KingdomYear: 2024A photograph taken by a Magnum photographer in 1982 lingers like a provocation: five men in fatigues inside a bombed-out room – four gaze outward, one meets the camera. The elusive image was said to show Bangladeshi fighters aligned with the PLO’s Fatah faction. Abu Ammar Is Coming revisits the revolutionary 1970s through the figure of Abu Ammar (the nom de guerre of Yasser Arafat), tracing how internationalist dreams flickered against the gathering dark.Ganga BuriDirector: Molla SagarCountry: BangladeshYear: 2009A lyrical poem about the forever flow of the Ganges river, Ganga Buri can be seen as a love letter to its position in people’s hearts. Focusing on the ancient ritual of ‘Ganga Puja’, where people come to be spiritually cleansed by the water, Sagar imagines the hopes of this mother river – that she would want to purify her children as they speak to her.Rankin Street, 1953Director: Naeem MohaiemenCountry: BangladeshYear: 2024In a small box salvaged from his old family home in Dhaka, Mohaiemen discovered over a hundred negatives, wrapped in wax paper and carefully labeled in his father’s handwriting. The intimate archive showed no rallies, no flags, only the quiet theatre of domestic life in newly formed East Pakistan – and lots of cats. In Rankin Street, 1953 / 2013, he scans, redraws, and narrates these fragments, asking how private tenderness shadows the larger, vanishing histories of a nation.Doodh KoilaDirector: Molla SagarCountry: BangladeshYear: 2006In Bucchigram, under Phulbari in Dinajpur, Santal farmers speak of the land as blood-bound – they will not leave it. Shot during the 2006–07 Phulbari coal movement, the film documents their resistance to open-cast mining and the threat to their agrarian way of life. Children sing “Amar Sonar Bangla” (My Golden Bengal, I love you) in school, even as the soil beneath them is marked for extraction. In Bangladesh, belonging becomes both anthem and barricade.Wooster StreetDirector: Naeem MohaiemenCountry: United StatesYear: 2024Wooster Street unfolds as an afternoon conversation between Naeem Mohaiemen and Judith Blum inside the storied Fluxus Building – a fading remnant of SoHo’s artist-run utopia shaped by George Maciunas. Weaving Blum’s voice with home movies and echoes of Jonas Mekas, the film becomes a lockdown elegy for a vanished community, where art once remade life – and now survives as memory.Follow the link for more information >>>

Educator and social theorist Tom Campbell in conversation around ways in which disability is shaped by the transformation of modern society. His upcoming book Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence mobilises Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of solid modernity and liquid modernity to examine changing forms of power, exclusion and moral indifference that disabled people face.Follow the link for more information >>>