1985 was a difficult year for me. My mother had died, an attempted love affair went badly wrong, I hadn't made a film for five years. I bought a video camera and went to Cuba for three weeks.
Music and memory play important parts. I first heard this particular music in Louis Malle's LES AMANTS (1958) when I was a teenager.
Between film screenings across the world, Mark Jenkin muses on cinematic influences, ponders cultural history and reflects upon home.
Official Selection Toronto International Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - European premiere
In this South Asian team sport, players repeating ‘kabaddi’ frantically cross boundaries on the court, tagging their opponents before returning.
Ka ba Ddi is a high-energy team sport originating in South Asia played between two teams of seven players on a divided court. Players respond to boundaries, bodies think in relation to each other: lines of the court, focal points for players movements. Stretching back into their own territory; a vocabulary of movement that make connections with what is happening in the wider world, in domestic UK politics but also internationally. Territory has never felt so terrifying or so contested. The rules based order of Kabaddi stipulates that one team sends a single "raider" into the opposing team's territory, the aim is to tag/touch as many players as possible from the opposing side before retreating back into your own territory. Rules govern our bodies, we live in a series of ever increasing courts both materially and ideologically.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Short Film Competition
MODUPE is an experimental documentary that unfolds as a ceremony of queer belonging, inheritance, and sound. At its heart is a dialogue with Afro-Cuban priestess and musician Amelia Pedroso, whose legacy is invoked through archival traces, letters, and performance. Narrated as a letter to an ancestor, the film situates the search for connection within an interior, oceanic dreamscape where water, memory, and ritual become both setting and subject.
Cinematically, MODUPE moves between a stylised ensemble rehearsal and a sacred library-archive. The ensemble of voice, drum, and dance provides the film’s pulse, collapsing rehearsal and ritual into one. Deep blue light, reflective surfaces, and submerged imagery create a sensorial architecture that is both intimate and expansive, with water presence throughout evoking both flood and transformation.
Formally, the film resists linear storytelling, privileging atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic immersion. Objects, archives, and sacred materials hold the same cinematic weight as bodies in performance, reframing the archive as altar and sound as shrine. Narrative unfolds through resonance rather than resolution, drawing the viewer into a space of listening and reflection. MODUPE proposes cinema as a vessel for inheritance, where identity is fluid, memory is alive and liberation is lived through sound.
A vampiric trio move through sacred ruins, where bodies blur, relics stir, and both life and death appear in shadow.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
London, 1888. The West End bourgeoisie revel in gossip whilst the East End is plagued with the terror of a new threat; Jack the Ripper.
Amongst the chaos and misinformation of the newspapers, an all-ladies ghost-hunting society has arisen. Their sole mission is to prove the papers wrong; to alert the public that the murderer is no man, but a monster.
But the women are not alone. Tamworth, a friend of one of the society members, Minnie, has recently manipulated and adapted a pinhole camera to record moving images.
The society welcomes him in as their documentarian, their captor of ‘proof’ to support their claims.
As we follow the women through a tumultuous series of seances, ghost hunts and murders, we become aware that Tamworth’s intentions are far more sinister than what they first seemed.
Forensic science is scrutinised when a fictional investigator questions procedures and motivations in the politicised 1999 bombings of flats in Russia.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2025
Locked and loaded with film tape, a man explores an abandoned rave house, once known as The Warehouse, that was once the beating heart of the South West’s clubland.
Burnt Toast is a contemporary ghost story that resurrects legendary British comedian Tommy Cooper, who famously died mid-performance in 1984. Blending machine learning, VHS footage, archival materials, and a trained impersonator, the film follows Phil, an unemployed magician trapped in the decaying home of the director’s late schizophrenic uncle. Phil’s hallucinatory act navigates the alienation of late capitalism, touching on social class, identity, mental health, and delusion—all punctuated by his trademark jokes and failed magic tricks.
An experimental silent film about water and coping with grief.
Princess, who recently lost her twin brother, Prince, has been struggling to sleep and maintain a routine. Worse still, the kitchen tap has been leaking for a month, and the water bill is extremely high. She finally calls a plumber who offers an unexpected solution. A random conversation forces her to move on from her past.
After travelling to Italy on the anniversary of her son's death, Magda - a Polish immigrant to Ireland - returns to Donegal, where she has a life-changing encounter with a refugee, newly arrived from Rwanda.
Arts Council of Ireland - Authored Works Award 2025 - Irish Film Institute - World premiere
A time capsule from the underground. NOVA 78 resurrects the electrifying Nova Convention of 1978 featuring never-before-seen footage of William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Patti Smith and other icons restored over a decade in the UK and reimagined as a cinematic event for today’s audiences.
Official Selection Locarno Film Festival 2025 - World premiere
