Carrying forward an ancestral practice, Mama Sarahn and Sekesa, two formidable Black midwives, provide safe home births for families in Atlanta, Georgia. Forced to work underground in a state where home-birth midwives cannot be licensed, they lead a campaign to change the law. Through intimate birth scenes, captured in timeless black and white, the film follows their fight for recognition against the backdrop of a maternal health crisis that disproportionately impacts Black women.
Hello You is an autopsy of your reflection. This mirror has two sides: one that observes, and another that follows. Exploring stories of altered perception, from phantom limbs to the feeling of being a stranger in your own body, the experience stretches the split-second act of self-recognition into something you can watch unfold. Here you are asked not to look at yourself, but at the lenses through which you look.
Ann finds herself on unstable ground after the death of her father. Growing up in a boarding house in Stockport with her mum, her obsession with music and her friendship with Hel are everything. But when local band Joy Division’s frontman Ian Curtis kills himself and Hel leaves town, everything collapses. Ann is drawn to alcohol and casual sex, but a magical rekindling of the past and a rediscovered cassette tape opens a door to a new beginning.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026 - Competition
A British-Iraqi nurse whose need for answers draws her deep into another family’s life, after a chance encounter with an older woman she suspects is connected to her parents’ fate in Iraq.
Edge is Everything is a love letter to photography and to the art of truly seeing. For over 30 years, Thomas Joshua Cooper has photographed the furthest edges of land with a 19th century camera. His work bears witness to landscapes transformed by climate change while recovering forgotten histories of migration, exploration and departure.
Cooper draws on his Native American heritage and an extraordinary archive of audio interviews he recorded in the 1970s with photography’s most influential figures, including Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Imogen Cunningham and Paul Strand. These previously unheard tapes create a rare intergenerational conversation about photography and artistic practice.
The film also examines the cost of an uncompromising creative life. His wife and adult daughter reveal the impact of his prolonged absences and challenge the mythology of the solitary artist.
At a time defined by speed, distraction and instant images, Edge is Everything asks what might happen if we slowed down long enough to fully observe. This question has guided Cooper since childhood, when he was taught by his Native American elders: “Each of us has an eye that sees and a seeing eye. When you learn which is which, you will have begun to become human.”
The story of Terry, a woman with no life beyond the ones she finds in her period romance books, and how she is forced into the real world when a glib comment at work causes her to punch the office misogynist, Kier, in the face. While everything in her screams to apologise and restore the status quo of the office, she can’t help but notice that things are better for everyone after the punch. Maybe things shouldn’t go back to the way they were? Needing someone to confide in, Terry finds an unlikely ally in nerdy introvert neighbour, Ember, who challenges Terry to lean into this newfound fierceness. Fight for more changes, small as they may be. Even put down the demure romances and pick up some epic fantasy. In order for the shy and mousey Terry to stand her ground and champion the changes she wants to see in the office, she must step away from the wall and be like the main characters she finds in her books. And she needs to do so fast, because Kier wants a rematch. Fantasy begins to bleed into reality as the office becomes grounds for the ultimate battle.
When a late bloomer is drawn to her carefree younger colleague, their disappointing first kiss shatters her fantasies, forcing her to confront the messy realities of human connection.
After leaving an abusive relationship, Raye returns to an arena where she was once a champion - the boxing ring. As she is trained by her teenage nemesis Jules, the chance arises for the two women to face each other in the fight of a lifetime.
Northern Irish Nollaig begins her Geo-astrophysics internship studies, in the unfamiliar city of Geneva. Its alien nature is compounded by the dominant characters of her host family David and Helen Wilcox, members of the diverse expat community, where the required external presentation of wealth and power is essential - a cloak to their hollow forms.
Nollaig is without self; her observational neutrality disarms, pushing those around her, to only crave more from her. Nollaig anchors her own sense of purpose by blood ties - her Uncle Nigel. His criminal past as a jewel thief, activates Nollaig’s first direction to become a skilled diamond thief herself.
In her exploration of unversed theft-ingesting and passing practices, Nollaig experiences a far more visceral and violent shift of value. Bodily destruction, radical weather events, cracks beginning to form. As Nollaig starts to become stronger, she is no longer a vessel but now an opponent - speaking to the vulnerability of the world and human presence around her. A violence of humanity in its purity. From a violent act, a benign outcome is born and Nollaig transforms everyone in her orbit.
A famous Black actor accepts a role in a lucrative government film, but when he learns he’s starring in a welcome video for a British Internment camp, he is confronted by the devastating cost of his political indifference.
