See T A P E shorts at ‘One Room Film Club’, a travelling film club, popping up across unexpected spaces to share fresh, bold, emotionally rich stories — especially from voices often pushed to the margins.
Join us this May as we screen three standout shorts centring Black, Arab and Muslim girlhood, told through the lenses of identity, grief, resistance, and the unshakeable power of self-discovery.
📽️ What’s Showing:
🌸 Essex Girls (dir. Yero Timi-Biu)
Bisola is trying to figure it all out — growing up as the only Black girl in a small Essex town where everyone expects her to fit a certain mould. But when she meets Ashlee, the confident, vibrant new girl in school, Bisola is invited into a new kind of sisterhood — one filled with joy, reflection, and magic.
Flipping the “Essex Girl” stereotype on its head, this nostalgic coming-of-age film is filled with BBM messages, Jane Norman bags, and warm snapshots of 2009 — but at its core, it’s about belonging and Black girl joy in unlikely places.
🌀 Neo Nahda (dir. May Ziadé)
Mona, a young Arab woman in London, stumbles across a set of archived photographs showing Arab women cross-dressing in the 1920s — a discovery that sends her into a whirlwind of imagination, desire, and self-reckoning.
Between fantasy and reality, Neo Nahda unearths hidden histories of Arab resistance and queerness. Visually stunning and politically charged, it’s a love letter to the archive — and a challenge to who gets remembered, and how.
🌙 Muna (dir. Warda Mohamed)
All Muna wants is to go on the school trip and play her perfect playlist — but when her grandfather dies in Somalia, she finds herself stuck in a house of grief for someone she never knew.
With heart, humour, and beautiful stillness, Muna tells the story of a British-Somali teen navigating loss, teenage dreams, and unexpected connection. A moving exploration of intergenerational memory, faith, and what we inherit from those we barely knew.
This Day is part of the Barking Open Studios by Bow Arts & The Boathouse Studios. This is an artist led Open Studio there where you can get a behind the scenes look at the prcatice and process of the resident artist and makers on the 17th of May.