BFMAF programmer Alice Miller talks to filmmaker Sacha Amaral about his feature film, The Please is Mine, that closed the 20th edition of BFMAF.

The Pleasure is Mine (El placer es mío)

• Director: Sacha Amaral
• Year: 2024

Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.

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BFMAF programmer Myriam Mouflih talks to filmmakers Sarah Ballard and Ufuoma Essi about the films they showed at BFMAF 2025.

Full Out

• Director: Sarah Ballard
• Year: 2025

In 19th century Paris, at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse… Full Out is the first in a suite of films investigating intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body’s capacity for knowing, and ways in which collective resonance can both fracture and heal.

Half Memory

• Director: Ufuoma Essi
• Year: 2024

Using Toni Morrison’s The Site of Memory as a starting point for integration, Half Memory is a languid mediation on memory, conurbations, isolation and the histories we live amongst. Oscillating between years, cities, and unfolding images, the film is an examination of the present as an artefact of the past. Shot on Super8 and filmed between the US, France and the UK over the past three years.

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A conversation with writer and filmmaker Philip Risk about his film Mapping Lessons, which was shown at BFMAF 2025.

Mapping Lessons (دروس خرايط)

• Director: Philip Rizk
• Year: 2020

Taking as its starting point the Syrian Revolution, then moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy in 1936 Spain, Angola, Palestine, and the Paris Commune amongst others, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts of dismantling the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.

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BFMAF programmer Ilinca Vanau talks to filmmakers Luciana Decker Orozco, Malena Szlam and Camara Taylor about the films they show at BFMAF 2025.

Language of the Entrails

• Director: Luciana Decker Orozco
• Year: 2025

A journey into the entrails of the earth through the digestion of food and images. We reconnect with interstitial spaces of the body and primal gestures that manifest memories of the past in the present. Language of the Entrails is inspired by the avant-gardist, indigenist Peruvian writer Gamaliel Churata’s novel El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) where a descent into the underworld reveals a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.

Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya

• Director: Malena Szlam
• Year: 2024

Mapping the lines of tectonic plates, Malena Szlam follows a constellation of ancient landforms that contour the shifting face of our environment. Eroded vestiges of volcanic activity and relics of the Gondwana Rainforest trace a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, illuminated in the afterglows of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption in 2022. Shot on 16mm and edited with multiple in-camera exposures, the film’s environmental evocations are further deepened by field recordings and sonic atmospherics from artist Lawrence English.

nobody's word

• Director: Camara Taylor
• Year: 2025

A family convenes exactly 500 years after Charles V grants permission to Lorenzo de Gorrevod ‘to import 4000 Africans into New Spain’. The King’s act marks the escalation of a rupture, with its origins in 1492, that remakes the world and reverberates into the present. This apparent “start of slavery” becomes an occasion to tell the story of one family’s implication across time and space. In nobody’s word Taylor digitises and disintegrates the family archive in order to reframe accounts, destabilise claims and inhabit spaces between fact and fiction, questioning the narrative impulses that inform the stories we tell.

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BFMAF programmer Ane Lopez talks to filmmakers Hope Strickland and Omar Chowdhury about the films they showed at BFMAF 2025.

a river holds a perfect memory

• Director: Hope Strickland
• Year: 2024

Water, labour, migration and diasporic memory coalesce in a transporting essay film connecting Jamaica and the UK. Assemblages of archival footage, 16mm and LIDAR scans mobilise water as a medium through which to connect disparate people across the flow of time and against the persistence of colonial erasures.

BAN♡ITS

• Director: Omar Chowdhury
• Year: 2024

Near the lawless eastern border of Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns with a band of washed up ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. Comically re-enacting their glorified pasts, they confront divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry and political resistance in its many unexpected contexts. The resulting para-fiction questions notions of authorship, morality, and representation. When the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?

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Q&A with filmmaker Tana Gilbert following a screening of Malqueridas, hosted by Ane Lopez.

Q&A with filmmaker Razan AlSalah following a screening of A Stone's Throw, which screened alongside Gelare Khoshgozaran's The Retreat. Hosted by Myriam Mouflih.

Reading and Q&A with artist and filmmaker Onyeka Igwe. And Let History Begin was a discursive reading and screening event that included her latest film A Radical Duet. Hosted by Myriam Mouflih.

Q&A with Dreaming and Dying filmmaker Nelson Yeo, hosted by Ilinca Vânău.

Q&A with filmmaker Nadia El Fani following a screening of Bedwin Hacker, hosted by Myriam Mouflih.