Russia/Chechnya : Voices of Dissent

Director: Carlo Nero

Year: 2006

An Englishwoman wakes up in the middle of the night in a small hotel in a poverty-stricken foreign city where a civil war is being fought. She has a fever, and tries to remember why she has returned to this frightening country. During the night, she starts to retrace her happy childhood and her relatively happy adult existence as a kind, hard-working professional woman who loved her family and friends, appreciated music and the arts. But she is also retracing the unusual events that have led her to this place, and how the people she has met on that journey began to change her understanding of the world. Now, in this lonely hotel room she is struggling with a new and unpleasant perception of herself and her life. As the dawn breaks, her fever subsides and with it comes an honest appraisal of herself. With gut-wrenching clarity she has come to understand her responsibility for the violence of poverty and exploitation she sees in the world.

Director: Emilio Guerrero Alexander

Year: 2026

Founded in 2004 by Damon Albarn and Ian Birrell, the UK music collective Africa Express has spent two decades bringing artists together across borders. In February 2024 it arrived in the Americas for the first time. Over eight days in Las Estacas, Mexico, more than 60 musicians from Africa, Latin America, Europe and the United States came together to rehearse, perform and create an album from scratch. Following Africa Express from Mexico through Europe and back, the film becomes a poetic journey through music, memory and imagination, celebrating the power of collaboration and community as reality slowly blurs with fantasy. With no single protagonist, the collective itself is the main character and music is its language. Africa Express is a portrait of a fleeting community and of what strangers from different worlds can build when they truly listen to each other.

Director: Bill Jones, Ben Timlett

Year: 2027

An intimate and wildly entertaining portrait of rock legend Brian Johnson, THE LIVES OF BRIAN charts his journey from working-class Newcastle to fronting AC/DC and recording the best-selling rock album of all time, told with his trademark wit, raw honesty, and a touch of Monty Python flair.