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: Alex Darby, George Leith, Sophie Mei Birkin

Year: 2026

Adlais (Echo) weaves Welsh language folklore and histories through their shared subjects of poetry and drowning – and asks whether we’re listening to the past as it surfaces today.

Director: Luca Anzalone

Year: 2026

Caught between her indigenous Buryat roots—where art is a shamanic window between worlds—and a Western market that treats culture as a commodity, artist Yuma Radne constructs a monumental canvas to confront the psychological distortions of colonization at the edge of an irreversible era. "Either you make art, or you suffer. It’s like a curse." For painter Yuma Radne, the act of creation is not an aesthetic choice, but an ancestral code carried in the blood. Moving from a remote Siberian village to the high-stakes European art world, Yuma finds herself navigating a surreal landscape where sacred cultural identity is rapidly converted into a luxury product. Through intimate studio dialogues and raw philosophical reflections, the film captures the gruelling physical and mental labour behind her graduation masterpiece, The End of Times. Centred around a gargantuan erupting booze (a traditional Buryat dumpling) mutated into an absurd, monumental symbol of a colonised and erased national identity, the film transcends a typical artist portrait. It becomes a vital, cosmic meditation on why humanity continues to create art in the face of systemic collapse—and a powerful testament to an indigenous culture refusing to be reduced to a souvenir.