This film follows the growth of the Afrocentric Black is Beautiful movement of the 60s and 70s through the lens of Kwame Brathwaite, pioneering Harlem photographer and its unsung godfather.
Kwame Brathwaite spent his life documenting black American history, photographing and befriending some of its biggest stars over his lifetime. He also founded grassroots fashion shows he called "Naturally" that celebrated natural black beauty and Afrocentrism in a time when it was deemed controversial, and heralded a new dawn for blackness across the globe.
Forgotten by history until his son uncovered his vast archive of photos in the 2010s, the film covers the revival of Kwame's legacy in the last few years of his life. Family, friends and artistic admirers championed Kwame's work in a bid to put his name on the map before his passing in 2023. Kwame's story weaves together the story of the black experience, cultural icons and activism, taking a Forrest Gump journey through the biggest names and moments in American culture.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Official Competition - World premiere
In this South Asian team sport, players repeating ‘kabaddi’ frantically cross boundaries on the court, tagging their opponents before returning.
Ka ba Ddi is a high-energy team sport originating in South Asia played between two teams of seven players on a divided court. Players respond to boundaries, bodies think in relation to each other: lines of the court, focal points for players movements. Stretching back into their own territory; a vocabulary of movement that make connections with what is happening in the wider world, in domestic UK politics but also internationally. Territory has never felt so terrifying or so contested. The rules based order of Kabaddi stipulates that one team sends a single "raider" into the opposing team's territory, the aim is to tag/touch as many players as possible from the opposing side before retreating back into your own territory. Rules govern our bodies, we live in a series of ever increasing courts both materially and ideologically.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Short Film Competition
A Jamaican mother in London uses a traditional meal to reconnect with her sons before their Caribbean roots are lost to their new English life.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
London, 1931. Abel Lively is broke, alone and terrified of going outside his one-man movie studio, Lively Pictures. A reality-challenged title writer with an imaginary parallel existence as the gun-slinging star of his own action-adventure serial, Abel is fast approaching a crossroads.
Penelope Peabody, a former Paramount poster artist and current unemployed portrait painter who shares Abel's distaste for talking pictures, catches his eye and unknowingly sets in motion a collision of worlds. Soon, Abel will be forced to face the perils and possibilities of two worlds: the one in his head, and the one in which he has a chance at real love.
What follows is a planet-spanning odyssey replete with mad scientists, barren wastelands, vengeful utility companies, draconian judiciaries, sinister machines, prophetic visions, unbearable heartache, crippling poverty, murderous phantoms, fiendish debt collectors and an interfering Betty Boop.
A silent film featuring performances from Louise Brooks, Wallace Beery and Edward G. Robinson alongside a modern cast, with an entirely original solo piano soundtrack.
Jennifer, a controlling mother, interferes in her nine-year-old daughter's audition in order to live out her own dreams.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
A wave of regeneration is hitting London’s working-class neighbourhoods. South of the river, the demolition of Elephant & Castle’s shopping centre has uprooted the community who made it their own. As they navigate an uncertain future, they carry with them the legacy of a place that once felt like home.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Short Film Competition - World premiere
The story of working-class women who, during the 1984–85 Miners' Strike, found themselves at the forefront of a battle against the British state. From Scotland down to Kent, women from the coalfields shed light on their experiences of the year long struggle, and how they became the backbone of the Strike. With many still active today, their actions reshaped the landscape of political activism for working-class women.
MODUPE is an experimental documentary that unfolds as a ceremony of queer belonging, inheritance, and sound. At its heart is a dialogue with Afro-Cuban priestess and musician Amelia Pedroso, whose legacy is invoked through archival traces, letters, and performance. Narrated as a letter to an ancestor, the film situates the search for connection within an interior, oceanic dreamscape where water, memory, and ritual become both setting and subject.
Cinematically, MODUPE moves between a stylised ensemble rehearsal and a sacred library-archive. The ensemble of voice, drum, and dance provides the film’s pulse, collapsing rehearsal and ritual into one. Deep blue light, reflective surfaces, and submerged imagery create a sensorial architecture that is both intimate and expansive, with water presence throughout evoking both flood and transformation.
Formally, the film resists linear storytelling, privileging atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic immersion. Objects, archives, and sacred materials hold the same cinematic weight as bodies in performance, reframing the archive as altar and sound as shrine. Narrative unfolds through resonance rather than resolution, drawing the viewer into a space of listening and reflection. MODUPE proposes cinema as a vessel for inheritance, where identity is fluid, memory is alive and liberation is lived through sound.
Delving into the life of a Palestinian in the UK, separated from a culture and a way of life, this film captures the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity, delivering a powerful statement about the intersection of personal struggle and political conflict and offering hope, challenging narratives, and inspiring solidarity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025
In Cambodia, former Khmer Rouge child soldier Aki Ra and his wife Hout help communities reclaim their land by undertaking the potentially lethal task of clearing unexploded landmines left over from years of war. Along the way they adopt unwanted kids whose childhoods and limbs have been destroyed by landmines, and open a war museum that soon becomes world famous. Aki Ra fights to break free of shadows cast by his role in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and rebuild his shattered family. But in a country grappling to come to terms with its history, the past always has a way of catching up.
A 1980s popstar receives a surprising invitation to perform, pulling him out of musical retirement and into a moral dilemma.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Short Film Competition - World premiere
Official Selection Belfast Film Festival 2025
A vampiric trio move through sacred ruins, where bodies blur, relics stir, and both life and death appear in shadow.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
