Is My Living in Vain

Director: Ufuoma Essi

Year: 2024

Using Toni Morrison’s ‘The Site of Memory’ as a starting point for interrogation, HALF MEMORY is a languid meditation on memory, conurbations, isolation, and the histories we live among. Oscillating between years, cities, and unfolding images, the film is an examination of the present as an artefact of the past. Shot on Super8 and filmed between the US, France and the UK over a period of years. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025

Director: Ufuoma Essi

Year: 2022

A meditative reflection on the absences found in rural pastoral environments, which are often framed by a false romanticism and picturesque conventions, constructed as tourist sites within rural landscapes across Britain.

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.