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