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
‘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.
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)
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
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.
A conversation with filmmaker Marion Scemama about the films shown in her Essential Cinema programme at BFMAF 2025.
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.
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.
Artist Chiemi Shimeda talks to filmmaker Morgan Quaintance and cultural sociologist Laura Harris about Quaintance's film Available Light.
Available Light
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.
BFMAF programmer Myriam Mouflih talks to filmmaker Ayanna Dozier about her BFMAF 2025 In Focus programme.
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
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.
BFMAF programmer Ilinca Vanau talks to fimmaker Amie Barouh about her film Shuruuk, which was shown at BFMAF 2025.
Shuruuk
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.
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.
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)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.
BFMAF programmer Myriam Mouflih talks to filmmakers Sarah Ballard and Ufuoma Essi about the films they showed at BFMAF 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.
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.
A conversation with writer and filmmaker Philip Risk about his film Mapping Lessons, which was shown at BFMAF 2025.
Mapping LessonsTaking 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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
