For close to 50 years, “film workers” Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi devoted themselves to looking at the horrors of the twentieth century
Experimental Docs
In this interview, Rajee Samarasinghe discusses making the limits of documentary practice visible in his short about forced disappearances in Sri
In this interview, Getting Real ’26 keynote speaker Petna Ndaliko Katondolo discusses the practice of ancestral ecology storytelling and using
The 16th edition continued the London fest’s commitment to experimental works as well as archival presentations that insist on their own urgency
Seven decades of nuclear documentaries oscillate between state propaganda and radical witness, revealing more about power than atoms
This essay and interview examines how James Benning’s EIGHT BRIDGES builds on his decades-long approach to extended observation, personal geography
In this interview, Kamal Aljafari discusses how three tapes filmed in 2001 revealed themselves as a new film, With Hasan in Gaza
In this interview, Iranian filmmaker Maryam Tafakory discusses how she abstracts and rewrites post-revolutionary Iranian cinema to reveal the queer
On the brink of America’s bicentennial, two filmmakers, a then-couple, filmed their cross-country road trips from the backseat of a car. The United States of America (1975) is the 27-minute product of these journeys and directors Bette Gordon and James Benning’s third and final collaboration. This short film typified the structuralist movement of avant-garde filmmaking, while also establishing documentary strategies that carry over to today.
Marking its 20th anniversary this edition (March 27–30, 2025), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has established itself as one of the UK’s most boundary-defying festivals for the moving image. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. Many of the featured works explore the body’s mnemonic capacities—how gesture, movement, and touch might commune with history, or reimagine how to engage with the unknowable: Underground, Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, Bounded Intimacy, an Eri Makihara program, and Nightshift.