* SOLD OUT *
Join us for a night of celebration and solidarity at the launch of the 7th annual London Migration Film Festival with a live performance by the Saied Silbak trio followed by a DJ set by Ernesto Chahoud!
Saied Silbak trio: Saied Silbak is a Palestinian composer and oud player born in Shafaa`mr, a city located in the lower Galilee of occupied Palestine. His newly formed trio brings to light a mixture of his own original compositions as well as songs from the classical Arabic and Turkish repertoire, exposing the audience not only to his beautiful and highly crafted compositions, but also to some of the most well-known composers of the golden age of Arabic music.
Saied is joined by Fred Thomas on double bass and Hanen Kiwan on percussion.
Ernesto Chahoud: Ernesto Chahoud is a renowned DJ, compiler and music researcher from Beirut who brings the most danceable and sometimes strangest records from the Middle East, Ethiopia, and beyond to people’s ears. He co-founded the Beirut Groove Collective and hosts monthly radio shows on NTS and Totally Wired Radio.
24 Nov, Upstairs at the Ritzy (SW2 1JG)
7pm for live band + DJ set
9pm for DJ set ONLY
25 November
* UK premiere *
Semret lives with her daughter Joe in a small apartment in Zurich, working in a hospital and studying to be admitted to midwife training. The young mother does everything she can to ensure her teenage daughter has a better life than the one she left behind in Eritrea. When Joe begins to press to know more about her origins, Semret must confront her own past, and the sheltered life she has built for herself in Switzerland threatens to disintegrate.
At once highly specific and universally accessible, this story is set within the unique context of Switzerland, the only country in Europe that returns Eritreans to Eritrea. This touching tale of a mother and daughter’s competing interests in relation to their ‘home’ country offers a keen insight into the role of trauma in forced migration.
Dir: Caterina Mona; Length: 1hr 25
25 Nov, 6:10pm. Genesis Cinema (E1 4UJ).
Freda lives with her family in a poor neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince. They make ends meet thanks to their small street shop. Faced with precarious living conditions and the rise of violence in Haiti, each of them wonders whether to stay or leave. But Freda wants to believe in the future of her country.
A beautiful and subtle examination of the many reasons people, and Haitians specifically, choose to leave or that ultimately drive them to stay. A uniquely Haitian story of political optimism, economic migration, and violence told through the eyes of three very different, but equally powerful, women.
Dir: Gessica Geneus; Length: 1hr 33
25 Nov, 8:20pm. Garden Cinema (WC2B 5PQ).
* SOLD OUT *
Through the Foreign City is a multi-disciplinary workshop exploring how moving from one space to another can challenge or nurture us. We will use theatre exercises as well as life drawing to reflect on how emotions are expressed, remembered and communicated when stepping into a foreign city. Together, we will explore our sense of agency and our ability to bring about social change.
This activity is open to any person aged 13+ and we will provide childcare for families with younger children.
Workshop run in collaboration with WassleArts, Babylon Project and Shahre Farang Stories.
26 Nov, 1:00pm, Upstairs at the Ritzy (SW2 1JG)
A love letter to immigrant daughters that feels familiar, but never “Hollywoodified”
The story of Sarah Obeng, the brilliant child of Ghanaian immigrants, who is quitting her Ivy League PhD program to follow her married lover to Ohio. When her mother dies suddenly, she bequeaths her daughter a Christian bookstore in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx where Sarah was raised.
A follow-up on the classic immigrant's tale, Queen of Glory provokes laughter and empathy, as its heroine is reborn through her inheritance.
Dir: Nana Mensah; Length: 1 hr 18
26 Nov, 2pm. Garden Cinema (WC2B 5PQ)
* SOLD OUT *
See link above for a full description of each film
They’re Playing My Song: Josephine (dir: Thom Andrewes, Catherine Carter, Miriam Sherwood, Will Gardner)
The Sparrow Is Free (dir: Niki Kohandel)
The Curtain (dir: Kateryna Pavlyuk)
Those Names (dir: Ines Saidi)
Ancora Non Lo So (dir: Maaria Sayed)
Violeta & Sofia (dir: Alejandra Rogghe Pérez, Noah Isa Berhitu)
This Is Forever (Dir: Susy Pena)
Forgotten in Exile – Conchis (dir: Sarah Bougsiaa, Sinai Stengel)
26 Nov, 3pm. Upstairs at the Ritzy (SW2 1JG).
In collaboration with T A P E and Birds’ Eye View we present a special screening of A Tale Of Love and Desire written and directed by Leyla Bouzid.
The screening will be presented with We Wrote In Symbols editor Selma Dabbagh.
A Tale of Love and Desire follows Ahmed, a 18-year old French-Algerian, who meets Farah, a young Tunisian girl. One born in France, and the other in Tunisia the result is an identity questioning culture clash. In their lessons about Arab literature Ahmed discovered more than just a collection of sensual and erotic tales as he tries to resist the desire he feels for Farah.
Dir: Leyla Bouzid; Length: 1hr 42
26 Nov, 5:40pm. Genesis Cinema (E1 4UJ).
* SOLD OUT *
In the Philippines, many women get deployed abroad to work as domestic workers or nannies. To do so, they leave their own children behind, before throwing themselves into the unknown. In one of the training centres dedicated to domestic work in the Philippines, a group of trainees are getting ready to face both homesickness and the possible abuses lying ahead.
Bordering on fiction, Overseas considers the role and reality of modern slavery within in a globalised world, while emphasising these women’s determination, sisterhood, and the strategies they find to face the ordeals that awaits them in the near future.
Dir: Sung-a Yoon; Length: 1hr 30
26 Nov, 6pm. Bertha Dochouse (WC1N 1AW)
A non-linear narrative in three chapters, in which we meet three Latin American Londoners and explore the different situations that Latin American people have experienced or are experiencing in the UK. Through their words, experiences, and eyes we hear the story of an immigration raid, meet a volleyball playing community, and get a glimpse of alternative therapy.
El Sentir de las Montañas is a gentle but visceral observation of arrival, community and healing. Whilst the stories are different, they are linked together through conversations of time, memory, and migration.
Screened alongside short film: The Bayview (dir: Daniel Cook, 18:18min)
Followed by a Q&A with director Tomás Fernández Vértiz
Dir: Tomás Fernández Vértiz, Length: 53mins
26 Nov, 6pm, Catford Mews (SE6 4JU)
Most people - migrants and non-migrants alike - want similar things: a comfortable and dignified life, human rights and worker's rights for all, to be 'heard' by the political system, strong public services, safety & peace.
But people are angry and everyone wants someone to blame: Brexit, Covid, the cost of living crisis, climate emergency, growing inequality. Within this context, refugees and other people on the move have been turned into scapegoats - in a classic 'divide and conquer' tactic where power is maintained by sewing division.
To counter this, we need a radical solidarity: one that recognises and actively resists the 'divide and conquer' tactics.
But what could this solidarity look like? How can we meaningfully dissent to the current political treatment of migration and resist the dehumanising rhetoric about migration that seeks to divide us? How can we highlight the similarities between people of differing beliefs? What can we do that actually makes a difference?
Join us for an interactive panel discussion with activists, experts by experience, and more to think about how we can bring people together, what meaningful solidarity looks like, and how we can resist!
27 Nov, 1pm. Upstairs at the Ritzy (SW2 1JG).
* SOLD OUT *
Bee Whisperer (Dir: Dhivya Kate Chetty)
My Mother’s Tongue (Dir: Sapana Pun)
There Are Lights (Dir: Nadia Emam)
Mogoneba, memories of a journey (Dir: Mar Garro Lleonart)
The Place That Is Ours (Dir: Dorothy Allen-Pickard, Zena Agha)
Life, In There (Dir: Rozalinda Borcila)
Not Go Gentle (Dir: Sasha Ihnatovich)
Warsha (Dir: Dania Bdeir)
27 Nov, 3pm. Upstairs at the Ritzy (SW2 1JG).
Three lives intersect in a Mixtec community in the highlands of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. During the festival of San Mateo, María, Esteban and Toña return to their birthplace. They all left for different reasons, and different reasons are bringing them back, but they each have something in common: their families need them back.
Dir: Ángeles Cruz; Length: 1hr 31
27 Nov, 2pm. Garden Cinema (WC2B 5PQ).
Three Roma living in England, but tied to central Europe, film themselves over a critical period as their lives are transformed by the combination of Brexit and Covid. All three face the universal dilemmas of an emigrant; an ambivalent yearning for their home country and an ambition to succeed in their adopted home. Yet all three are conscious of their particular Roma heritage, a community that is almost never depicted on screen.
Screened as part of Made in Prague Festival and in collaboration with Czech Centre London
Followed by Q&A with director Mira Erdevički and the main film protagonists Denisa Gannon, Petr Torák and Ondrej Oláh
Dir: Mira Erdevicki Length: 1hr 30
27 Nov, 6:15pm, Genesis Cinema (E1 4UJ).
28 November
Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research centre was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups.
Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. It captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young refugee women.
Dir: Jumana Manna; Length: 64mins
Screened with short film: Born in Damascus (dir: Laura Wadha; Length: 15:06min)
28 Nov, 6.20pm. Lexi Cinema (NW10 3JU)
After they fled the war in Syria, the Suleyman family scattered across Europe and the Levant. Lazgin lives with his family in Ukraine, while his brothers are in Germany, Kurdish Iraq and Syria.
This Rain Will Never Stop, a visually-arresting but a gentle documentary exploring how people who had to flee their homes twice cope with and build new lives, follows Lazgin's family, as they encounter yet another military conflict, this time in Ukraine.
Whether to escape the war or help relieve the suffering on site - such is the dilemma that the family struggles with.
28 Nov, 6.30pm. SOAS, Khalili Lecture Theatre (WC1H 0XG)
29 November
Mountakha is a Senegalese man and a newcomer in Buenos Aires. In Dakar he used to work as a truck driver and he tries to get that job in this new city as well. While working as a street vendor in the meantime, he wonders if his destiny might be related to acting, as some of his new friends have a special bond with cinema.
A tone poem of a film that explores a city hidden within a city. Through meditative songs and sounds we unpeel the layers of Mountakha’s life as he grapples with work, being undocumented, maintaining connection with a family so far away, and the warmth of home versus the joys of the life he has found in Argentina.
Dir: Andrés Guerberoff; Length: 1hr 1
Screened alongside short film: Traana (Temporary Migrant) (A film by Raphaël Grisey, Kàddu Yaraax, Bouba Touré)
29 Nov, 7pm, Room B103, SOAS University of London (WC1H 0XG)
‘In different places, different thoughts emerge.’ Irish artists, Desperate Optimists (aka Molloy and Lawlor) have spent three decades in England – raising their now nearly-adult daughter Molly, and putting down creative and personal roots.
In The Future Tense, they consider whether it’s now time to make a move, in an essay film as erudite as it is funny. They explore their own migration story, those of many before them and ask: ‘does Ireland have an addiction to mass emigration?’ And if so, how has English colonialism shaped that?
Dir: Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy; Length: 1hr 29
29 Nov, 6:20pm, Bertha Dochouse (WC1N 1AW)
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Mukhabbat, an Uzbek immigrant, works at a convenience store on the outskirts of Moscow. Just like the rest of the immigrants at the store, she is forced to work without getting paid and endure mental and physical abuse, until the day she overcomes her fear and takes her fate into her own hands.
Based on true events and active legal cases of immigrants in Russia, Convenience Store captures the terrible aspects of modern slavery in a visceral blend of realism, documentary style, and operatic-scale cinema.
Dir: Michael Borodin; Length: 1hr 46
29 Nov, 6.15pm, Lexi Cinema (NW10 3JU)
Closing night film: Crossing Voices (Xaraasi Xanne) + pre-screening discussion with director
Using rare cinematic, photographic and sound archives, Crossing Voices recounts the exemplary adventure of Somankidi Coura, an agricultural cooperative created in Mali in 1977 by western African immigrant workers living in workers’ residences in France.
The story of this improbable, utopic return to the homeland follows a winding path that travels through ecological challenges, neo-colonialism, and conflicts on the African continent from the 1970s to the present day.
Join us for a free pre-screening discussion with director Raphaël Grisey
Dir: Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré; Length: 2hr 3
30 Nov, 8pm for director ‘meet & greet’.
8:50pm for film screening. Genesis Cinema (E1 4UJ).
DULCIS IN FUNDO
If all this isn’t enough, if you can’t make it to our in person events, or if you can’t get enough of migration film, check out our free, online programme - offered to you in collab with MUBI!
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Partners
Many thanks to Dr Colm McAuliffe for the advice & guidance.