London Film Festival returns for its 68th edition, along with a lineup of artists films carefully curated in the Experimenta programme. Today, we bring you a selection of titles connected by their engagement with the past. Artists dip into the archives, retrieving treasures that raise more questions than answers. Others recollect the past through stories shared by older relatives. Included is a new project from Aesthetica Art Prize 2024 winner Maryam Tafakory (b. 1987). Razeh-del (2024) is featured in the Collective Summoning reel, which spotlights films focusing on ritual, myth and national history in Palestine, Thailand and Iran.
Small Hours of the Night (2024) | Daniel Hui
A stern man interrogates a woman on a rainy night. Daniel Hui’s drama draws together moments of political resistance in Singapore, shining a light on it’s complicated legal history. Dialogue echoes in a smoke-filled room, slowly revealing contradictions, hypocrisies and new meanings. It’s a film that challenges assumptions we accept as true and offers a defiant response to our current political moment.
Notes: Remembered and Found (2024) | Maria Anastassiou
Four generations of women gather in a circle to recall their family origins. Their narratives take us back to the 1974 war in Cyprus, as each person grapples with a past they are either reciting from memory or repeating from inherited stories. Together, they revisit cassettes recounting war and displacement and mediate their intergenerational family story. Notes: Remembered and Found documents the act of archiving.
Razeh-del (2024) | Maryam Tafakory
In 1998, two schoolgirls sent a letter to Zan, Iran’s first-ever women’s newspaper. Whilst they waited to be published, they considered making an impossible film. Maryam Tafakory won the 2024 Aesthetica Art Prize with Nazarbazi (2022), which explores intimacy in post-revolution Iranian cinema where on-screen physical contact is banned. Now, she offers a thoughtful video tribute to women fighting to create art.
The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024) | Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Uncover a homage to a pioneer of Afro-Caribbean surrealism and co-founder of Tropiques. Overshadowed by husband Aime Césaire, we get fragments of Suzanne’s life as a teacher, organiser and mother. Guided by her writing and testimony from her family, the camera honours lost memories. As the lead actress, Zita Hanrot says at the start: “we’re making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered”.
The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024) | Alexis Kyle Mitchell
Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s poetic film essay centres the “lived body.” It’s a project that reverberates with people that move, desire, suffer and simply exist alongside each other. Composed of a collage of home movie footage, hand-processed abstract film and recordings of her own online calls, this is a thought-provoking project that delves into the lived experience of living with and alongside disease and disability.
BFI London Film Festival, Experimenta | 9-20 October
Image Credits:
- Small Hours of the Night (2024), dir. Daniel Hui
- Notes: Remembered and Found (2024), dir. Maria Anastassiou
- The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire (2024), dir. Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
