The Ancestors Came

Director: Cecile Emeke

Year: 2015

"I think art is powerful and I think it has affected all of us in some way, shape or form. Whether it’s you’re favourite character or scene from a TV show or a film or a play. Or maybe it’s just a line in a song. Sometimes it’s a line that you’ve heard one hundred times and it’s only on the one hundred and first time it clicked and meant something to you. Sometimes it’s a line that grabbed your attention straight away. And that’s what 'Lines' is about." Cecile Emeke Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Sonic Strand - World premiere

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.

Director: Mark Forbes

Year: 2021

Tobias & The Angel are famous for their shop in West London where all the different aspects of what they do that are combined to make it feel like home. The shop is owned and run by Angel Hughes and has a story to tell about her family beginnings.