Closer To Home - The Restoration of Leighton House Museum

Director: Frederique Cifuentes Morgan

Year: 2011

Frédérique Cifuentes's first documentary film, Cinema in Sudan: Conversation with Gadalla Gubara, builds up a portrait of a great Sudanese film-maker, Gadalla Gubara. He was one of the pioneers of cinema in Africa. Through his oeuvre, Gadalla reveals to us a Sudan both mysterious and misunderstood. Despite censorship and lack of financial support over sixty years, he has produced cinema that is independent and unique in a country where freedom of expression is a rare luxury. The film Conversations with Gadalla Gubara retraces the struggle of a man who received the 2006 Award for Excellence for his career at the Africa Academy Awards, Nigeria. Gadalla was a person with a unique character: a Sudanese of great charm, caustic in his criticism of film-making, a humorist of refinement whose blindness has not tempered the rebel in him. He was, moreover, one of the last great figures of African cinema still with us. He knew the ending of the colonial era, saw the pomp and the disillusion, watched as his country sank into the depths of obscurantism. In 1969, Gadalla and his friends, Ousmane Sembene, Trinté Bassori, Mustapha Alassane came up with a revolutionary idea: FESPACO.

Director: Hannah Berryman

Year: 2024

A landmark feature documentary about astronaut Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot and command the Space Shuttle. Eileen’s incredible journey starts with her smalltown beginnings, sees her smash through many glass ceilings, and culminates in four dramatic space shuttle missions, the last being possibly the most dangerous and most important of them all. At its heart the film is the moving human drama of one family, where a mother’s extraordinary career takes us straight to the big philosophical question of what is the level of acceptable risk in human endeavour? This film celebrates Commander Collins’ trailblazing NASA career which opened the way for women to become spacecraft pilots and commanders, and proved a perfect riposte to a previous generation of male astronauts who thought there was no place for women to lead the way in space. Official Selection DOC NYC 2024 - World premiere Official Selection CPH:DOX 2025 - European premiere

Director: Rosario Hurtado, Roberto Feo, Stuart Bannocks

Year: 2025

AS TIME SWALLOWS TIME weaves fragmented narratives into a poetic dialogue between two entwined inquiries. The first engages with the curatorial focus of BIO28 (Ljubljana Design Biennale), which interrogates the historical symbolism linking women to flowers - figures of fragility, sensuality, and objectification - and the ways these associations have been reclaimed and subverted. The second unfolds as a speculative exploration of time and temporal perception as forces shaping human consciousness and evolution. Together, these threads compose a meditation on transformation, perception, and the cyclical nature of existence. Constructed through the juxtaposition of narrative fragments, the film layers scenes in a manner that invites viewers to navigate and reassemble its temporal and conceptual terrain. The film presents a dialogue between the Ljubljana Biennale’s curatorial theme, “Do You Speak Flower?” which explores the historical contexts in which women have been symbolically linked to flowers—figures of fragility, sensuality, and objectification—and how those associations have been reclaimed and subverted, and this theme directly, and the authors speculative exploration of time, temporal perception and post humanity.