Daily programme of free screenings and in-depth conversations with festival filmmakers, hosted by tutors from the Documentary & Ethnographic Film MA (UCL). For students in higher education only. All screenings take place at Close-Up Film Centre at 11am. 

These screenings are open by application only. The closing date for applications is midnight on Tuesday 2nd April.

Thursday 25 April: The Soldier’s Lagoon

Pablo Álvarez-Mesa / 2024 / Canada, Colombia / 75’ / Digital / Spanish spoken, English subtitles

La Laguna del Soldado is the second part in Pablo Álvarez-Mesa’s trilogy of films retracing Simón Bolívar’s passage during the Liberation Campaign of Colombia in 1819. The film follows Bolivar’s path high into the Andean mountains and the foggy páramo ecosystem through which he led his troops in their final march towards Bogotá. Referred to as “the land of the mist” by Spanish Conquistadors, the páramo is a major source of water for the country but the extreme temperatures and high altitude make it an incredibly harsh and treacherous environment for humans. Alvarez-Mesa reflects on the weight of history in the territory, combining 16mm imagery with testimony from a polyphony of voices including botanists, crafts people and historians to excavate centuries of buried trauma and violence from the land.

Followed by a conversation with Pablo Álvarez-Mesa hosted by Richard Alwyn.

Friday 26 April: GAMA

Kaori Oda / 2023 / Japan / 53’ / Digital / Japanese spoken, English subtitles

Gama is Kaori Oda’s hour-long descent into the eponymous subterranean refuges used by thousands of Japanese civilians to escape American aggressions during World War Il. Now serving as both a tourist destination and stalactite-ridden cemetery, solemn “peace guides” man these underground caves, seemingly oblivious to the ghost that flanks them. Stoically, they recite testimonies which reveal the individual stories behind mass suicides encouraged by the Japanese military, conveying their ramifications for both those who partook in the ritual, and those who shirked it. Slowly, soberingly, excavating the hysteria and pain of a historical conflict, Oda offers an immersive encounter in order to transmit the “dark experience” of the gamas’ subterranean dwellers. Unearthing a context in which the daylight atrocities of international warfare rippled down to civil conflict in the cavernous darkness below ground, Gama carefully carves a space for these buried stories to surface.

Followed by a conversation with Kaori Oda hosted by Lucy Parker.

Saturday 27 April: Self-Portrait: Window in 47KM

Zhang Mengqi / 2019 / China / 110’ / Digital / Mandarin Chinese and Hubei local dialects spoken, English subtitles

Zhang Mengqi has made 10 films chronicling the past and present of her ancestral village, 47 km. The place’s peculiar name comes from its distance to the nearest city of Suizhou, which encapsulates both the context and potency of the project: “were it not for these films, no one would know about life there”, says Zhang.

The eighth instalment in Zhang’s 47 km series is perhaps her most measured exploration of the village, shedding a delicate light on the two protagonists: Li Guiting and Fang Hong. Li is an 85-year-old man who recounts how his own life story became enmeshed with the turbulent history of China. Fang is a 15-year-old girl who visits the village elders to draw their portraits and imagines a new future for 47 km and its inhabitants. Adopting an unhurried approach, this is a highly immersive film, bathed in winter sun, allowing space for memory to breathe.

Followed by a conversation with Zhang Mengq hosted by Michael Stewart.

Sunday 28 April: Artistes en Zone Troublés

Stéphane Gérard, Lionel Soukaz / 2023 / France / 39’ / Digital / French and Spanish spoken, English subtitles

In Artistes en Zone Troublés, 2000 hours of personal video footage shot by Lionel Soukaz in the early 1990s are edited by Stéphane Gérard to form a 38-minute eulogy for, and celebration of, Soukaz’s partner, the artist Hervé Couergou. Soukaz’s and Gérard’s collaborative film comes to form a beautifully-rendered portrait of the then 29 year-old Couergou, whose life is abruptly cut short by illness, and is a meditation on creativity and death during the injustices of the AIDS crisis.

Followed by a conversation with Stéphane Gérard hosted by Dieter Deswarte.

Monday 29 April: Sunless Haven

George Clark | 2024 | UK | 30′ | Digital | English spoken

“Animating a host of dispersed fragments from historical documents to architectural remnants and the river, Sunless Haven looks at the docklands as a resonant chamber connecting disparate worlds.” (George Clark)

Clark worked with historian Simeon Koole, sound artist Jol Thoms and performance artist Yarli Allison to imagine the experiences in, around and through the London Docklands at the turn of the 20th century. “Woven into the film are attempts to understand the docklands as a meeting place between different ecologies, enclosures and epochs, as a point of entanglement of the city and world. The film looks at ways to describe and embody these enmeshed histories from the legacy of police persecution of seaman boarding houses and Indian dockworkers known as lascars to the traces of early Chinatown in Limehouse and the experiences of London by Ayahs and Amahs, predominantly Chinese or Indian nannies brought back from the colonies and abandoned in the city after the voyage.” (George Clark)

Followed by a conversation with George Clark.

Tuesday 30 April: background

Khaled Abdulwahed / 2023 / Germany / 64’ / Digital / Arabic and German spoken, English subtitles

In 1956, the filmmaker’s father travelled to the GDR to study as an exchange student from Aleppo. Now, living in Leipzig, the filmmaker attempts to reconcile the traces of his father’s time in Germany with the images of the country he encounters in the present. The few photographs taken of his father and isolated documents in German archives go some way to materialising the memories shared between father and son across temperamental long-distance phone lines but the distance, between Syria and Germany, between the 1950s and the 2020s, persists. The gaps are filled by the filmmaker himself, creating images he did not see and memories that he was not told, to work around the limitations placed upon him by borders, technology and time.

Followed by a conversation with Khaled Abdulwahed hosted by Lasse Johansson.