In addition to our own curated seasons we also guest curate for festivals and organisations.

Scroll down to find details of films, themes and more as part of our guest curations over the years.

ASFF 2023

SUN, SMOKE, SAND, CONCRETE

To live in a city can be a love/hate experience; the places where we build our homes can swallow us, alienate, or make us feel displaced. For those who move here from somewhere else or who are made to feel unsafe or unwanted in city streets, the desire to escape can be even stronger. In these films we see various attempts to push past the limits placed on us by urban spaces - through summer vacations, a trip to another planet, a wish to return home or leaps of imagination. Yet one person’s fantasy can be another person’s prison, and when our romantic illusions hit against another perspective or culture, we can find ourselves more lost than ever…

  • An intimate portrait of Freedom Dabka Group, a group of Palestinian-American performers use the traditional Dabka dance as a means to build a community in Brooklyn.

  • Dampened by office life during a wet Vancouver winter, a genderqueer Trinidadian woman misses Carnival season, until one night she discovers the power of masquerade comes from within.

  • An amateur filmmaker invites a student to edit his work, but the power dynamic between visitor and host is upended when questions are raised about the ethics of using images to construct alternative escapist realities.

  • A group of friends head from grimy New York to paradise in Costa Rica, discovering in the process that some holidays are as much about chaos and mayhem as relaxation and release.

  • Tomoko arrives in London from Japan and comes across a secret underground city. When she finds it, everything changes.

  • When an astronaut finds herself stranded on a foreign planet, and her initial fear soon gives way to an insatiable need to experience this new world with all her senses.

ASFF 2022

TALES, WAVES, MYTHMAKERS, REBIRTH

This programme explores experimental and mythical work which surrender themselves to water. Whether destructive, isolating, replenishing, symbolic or a complete re-birth the films explore the power of heritage and ancestry. Ebbing and flowing between reality and mysticism we ponder the shape of water and the forms they take in our construction of stories.

  • An experimental split-screen video that emulates the ultimate precious object: a family photo book. Moving from the personal to the wider community, the film illustrates the fast-moving conditions of flash floods and climate change phenomena in Malaysia.

  • The film follows Nwa, a British Nigerian woman tormented by her inability to have children. However, a transformative baptism leads her on a journey of healing and rebirth.

  • Taking the elegance and poetic power of the sea as main elements, Andrade subverts the role traditionally imposed on women. Images that, when fading out, reflect a world whose sensitivity is mutating.

  • A film written, shot and performed by multiple selves of the artist in an island summer house. Having planned a piece with performers whose arrival was prevented by storms, stranded for seven days the artist made a different film using the only body available behind and in front of the camera.

  • Years after the disappearance of her father in Scotland, a young woman recalls her childhood on a Caribbean island.

  • A moving-image collaboration unfolding from the creators’ perspectives in the Somali diaspora, the piece takes the lead from East African mythos and Islamic imagery to explore mythmaking, Blackness; a ‘generation of ghosts’ and the transient spirit.

LSFF 2023

BLACK COUNTRY 2.0

Looking beyond borders, here we find stories from the Black British experience in a world of fairytales and freedom. In this second iteration of Black Country, we experience the friendships and adventures erupting outside of capitals. Whether imagined or based on personal realities these films delve into the polylithic histories and stories of Black communities across the UK.

  • We are instantly taken into the frantic world of Li (Shin-Fei Chen, Chinese Burn) - a vulnerable, and injured Taiwanese woman on the run. Desperate to escape the men pursuing her, she seeks uninvited shelter inside the home of elderly St Lucian widower, Errol (Joseph Marcel, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). Despite not speaking one another's language, the two form an intimate bond of friendship over the course of one day. What unfolds is a universal tale of compassion and trust that reveals two resilient people helping one another through trauma and grief.

  • Black Voices, the Birmingham based all-female group of a cappella singers,express the issue of the high incidence of serious mental health illness among Caribbean immigrants in Britain through song lyrics used with free-style dance movement.

  • An afro-futuristic fairytale of love, following the ceremony of a mother giving away her son. She gifts him with a heavy crown which comes with a mission and a price. “Flowers” reimagines what a black fairy-tale could look and feel like, adopting references to classic Disney stories from the 1930s-50s and modernising tropes for this whimsical coming of age tale.

  • Trapped in a cell, a Black artist listens to the radio and learns that liberation comes with a price."To become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave." Assata Shakur

  • Whittle’s 2019 filmwork What Sound Does the Blk Atlantic Make? departed from a visit to the archives of the North British Rubber Company, founded in Edinburgh in 1856 by American businessmen Henry Lee Norris and Spencer Thomas Parmelee. During early explorations of the material held in the company’s archives in the Ewart Library, in Dumfries, Scotland, slippages in terminology surrounding the materials under explorations became apparent—between Scotland and Barbados, and over the course of time

  • Documentary about the Munirah Black women's theatre company, interweaving performances of their 'choreo-poems' with their accounts of the genesis of each piece.