BFMAF public programmer Dawn Bothwell talks to artist Kim Coleman about her work with Wendy Clarke and their Endless Love Tapes exhibition at BFMAF 2025.

Endless Love Tapes

• Director: Wendy Clarke
• Year: 1977 – present

‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’ ~Wendy Clarke

Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them.

But how can a participatory art project started by an individual artist continue indefinitely? And how can everyone really participate in it?

Clarke and Coleman aim to answer this question and to achieve what Clarke has always wanted – for everyone in the world to be able to make a Love Tape. The pair have crafted a manual to share and continue Clarke’s process, enabling people to add Loves Tapes from their own communities to the growing collection indefinitely, without direct communication with the artist.

Berwick Film Festival 2025 celebrates the start of a year of their Endless Love Tapes project which tests the potential for Clarke’s Love Tapes to grow endlessly.

Endless Love Tapes at Berwick Film Festival – managed by Wendy Clarke and Kim Coleman – is the first in a year-long pilot project which gives a series of communities to make new Love Tapes. 

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Art Historian Theo Gordon talks to artist, educator and writer Conal McStravick about their Propositions Programme, shown at BFMAF 2025.

Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms)

• Director: Stuart Marshall
• Year: 2024

Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) is a 1983 artist’s video on the subject of AIDS, by the LGBTQ+ and AIDS video artist and TV documentarian Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Presumed lost and unseen for almost 40 years, this 25-minute video (of the original 28 minutes) is likely to be the first AIDS activist video in the global archive.

Robert Marshall

• Director: Stuart Marshall
• Year: 1991

Robert Marshall is structured in two movements. Through the memories of his father, fragments of the son’s youth are revealed, forming both a biographical portrait of Robert and an autobiographical portrait of Stuart Marshall. The second sequence stages Marshall’s AIDS alternative health regimen of herbal and acupuncture treatments with a recording of a telephone conversation between Stuart and an HIV physician in San Francisco. The pros and cons of the drug AZT are discussed long-distance. The video offers a poignant yet politicised meditation on memory and trauma, community knowledge and medical ethics.

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A conversation with filmmaker Marion Scemama about the films shown in her Essential Cinema programme at BFMAF 2025.

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Artist and Curator Hannah Wallis talks to filmmaker Eri Makihara about her film Listen, that was shown at BFMAF 2025.

This Q&A was delivered with Japanese Sign Language, British Sign Language, English Live Captions and spoken English. The Sign Language interpreters were Christy Dodds, Chisato Minamimura, Dee Savage and Aki Takizawa. The recording contains some level of audio interference due to the translation software being used during the Q&A.

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Artist and Curator Hannah Wallis talks to filmmaker Eri Makihara about her films Dream of My Mother and The Tanaka Family, that were shown at BFMAF 2025.

This Q&A was delivered with Japanese Sign Language, British Sign Language, English Live Captions and spoken English. The Sign Language interpreters were Christy Dodds, Chisato Minamimura, Dee Savage and Aki Takizawa. The recording contains some level of audio interference due to the translation software being used during the Q&A.

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Artist Chiemi Shimeda talks to filmmaker Morgan Quaintance and cultural sociologist Laura Harris about Quaintance's film Available Light.

Available Light

• Director: Morgan Quaintance
• Year: 2025

Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London, a productive dialectic opens between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities. Combining trademark immersive sound design with impressionistic images and abstractions, Quaintance crafts an austere, oneiric and subtly affecting portrait of residential precarity.

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BFMAF programmer Myriam Mouflih talks to filmmaker Ayanna Dozier about her BFMAF 2025 In Focus programme.

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BFMAF programmer Alice Miller talks to filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe about his feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, that opened the 20th edition of BFMAF.

Your Touch Makes Others Invisible

• Director: Rajee Samarasinghe
• Year: 2025

When a supernatural entity plagues a village community in war torn Northern Sri Lanka, a mother loses her son. Set in militarily occupied territory marked by 26 years of civil war, this hybrid docufiction made collaboratively, and secretly, with impacted Tamil communities lyrically examines the stories of missing people. A potent, elliptical protest poem moving with grace and purpose between disparate cinematic forms.

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BFMAF programmer Ilinca Vanau talks to fimmaker Amie Barouh about her film Shuruuk, which was shown at BFMAF 2025.

Shuruuk

• Director: Amie Barouh
• Year: 2024

Translating as “rising in the east”, Shuruuk follows a dreamlike, diaristic journey from Japan to Tunisia; from Palestine to France. Amie Barouh’s intimate, roving camera bears witness to the flow of life and movement from East to West. Five years of documentation form an impressionistic, beautifully honest portrait of diasporic and immigrant communities, and an ode to the resilience of people living life in exile.

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Writer and filmmker Philip Rizk is joined by Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and Mai Taha, Assistant Professor in Human Rights at LSE to explore the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Franz Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in.

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