The Lynda Myles Project: A Manifesto

Director: Susan Kemp

Year: 2016

A biographical documentary about the remarkable and turbulent career of British film and TV director Antonia Bird - the first British woman to direct a Hollywood movie, who died in 2013. The film explores her battles to break down the barriers against her gender and her politics, to get her voice heard, and to bring a radical edge to popular drama. It reveals the secrets of her greatest work - Safe, Priest, Face, Ravenous, Care, The Hamburg Cell - through the testimony of her closest friends and collaborators, including Robert Carlyle, Mark Cousins, Kate Hardie, Irvine Welsh and Steven Mackintosh.

Director: Karimah Ashadu

Year: 2025

With no single protagonist or linear narrative, the film immerses the viewer in a spectacle of strength through an intimate portrait of bodybuilders in the slums of Lagos. Inflated muscles, bulging veins and luminous skin glistening with sweat fill the screen. Shot almost entirely in close-ups, the camera hovers so near its subjects, moving softly like breath on skin, that at times figures become blurred, abstracted forms. Karimah Ashadu’s slow, measured pans across backs, chests and arms meditate on visibility, drawing attention to the embodiment and representation of the Black male body without rendering it singular or fixed. The metallic clang of barbells is punctuated with guttural sounds of exertion set against the ambience of the streets. Breath and muscle move in syncopated sonic choreography, and the men’s commitment to the ritual of maintaining the body is evident. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Expanded - International Premiere

Director: Kristina Mikhailova

Year: 2026

Young women see themselves as rivers, connecting poetic imagery to landscapes in a multi-voiced narrative that transforms into political commentary: Kazakh women choose to live without men. Official Selection Berlin International Film Festival 2026 - Forum Special - World premiere