The Archive: Queer Nigerians

Director: Simisolaoluwa Akande

Year: 2025

Baby dons a fluorescent pink wig and an unflinching smile on her socials, selling an airbrushed life in Europe to entice young Nigerian girls. Behind the filtered posts lies a more harrowing truth: Baby is trapped in a network of sex trafficking, surviving by enforcing the very system that once consumed her. Past rituals inflicted on the girls not only keep their bodies imprisoned, but also their minds, believing their silence and subservience dilutes their cursed lives. But, when someone from Baby's past becomes the newest recruit, Baby's carefully constructed world crumbles. Baby is confronted with guilt, complicity, and the crushing weight of unfulfilled dreams. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025

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.