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: Edward Lovelace

Year: 2026

Defined for much of his life by other people's perceptions of his visible difference, actor Adam Pearson finds a new sense of possibility when he meets Ellie, a teenage girl living with the same genetic condition. As their unlikely friendship inspires Adam to confront the rules he's built to protect himself, he returns to the big screen and discovers that the hero he's been searching for may be himself. Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2026 Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026

Director: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor

Year:

The final part of a documentary trilogy that began with 'Further Beyond' and 'TheFuture Tense', 'ACT 3' completes Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s exploration of ideas around identity, place and memory. Here, they delve in to their past work and creative collaboration across 40 years to explore the possibility of their future identities; and how they choose to imagine the final third of their life. Mining the intimate relationship of artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore – who are the subject of their current feature film – and taking their typically droll, existentially-inflected, meta approach, the documentary ultimately becomes a moving meditation on the meaning of life, art and love. Official Selection Telluride Film Festival 2026 Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2026