I don’t belong here (threshold anxiety)

What does it mean to belong, to partake? This programme gathers films that explore the cinematic potential of borders, as an ongoing settler-colonial occupation-driven genocide comes under global scrutiny. Yen Lim’s exits / entrances meditates on the act of crossing thresholds with cultural unfamiliarity and the search for connection through these shifting transitional spaces. Notes from Brook House layers enunciators delivering fragments of testimony from sites of passage and control. The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing is a work of archiveology, resituating images from the past to lay claim to the filmmaker’s place in the present. Dajla: cinema and oblivion explores the experience of disrupting sites of displacement when a Sahrawi refugee camp is temporarily transformed into a film festival. As the programme unfolds, cinema becomes a space where the closed rigidity of borders yields to the openness of collective remembrance and shared histories.

The session will feature a Q&A with xxx, chaired by festival director Ryan Powell.

exits / entrances

Yen Lim / 2024 / Singapore / 11:22

I live to leave, I leave to live. A confrontation with both cultural unfamiliarity and personal introspection– what lies beyond those doors? Are they just symbols of transition, curiosity, and the constant negotiation between leaving and staying? Why do we constantly seek for more? Of stepping into others' safe spaces and leaving something behind, of human connection and freedom across linguistic barriers and unfamiliar territories. On embracing yet questioning the in-between, the shift in physical and lyrical perspectives, while trusting every move/mistake made.

Notes from Brook House

Alex Nevill / 2025 / UK / 28:00

Airports, detention centres, sea containers. Slow, roaming shots linger on places of passage and confinement, where movement is measured and controlled. Fragments of stories, words passed from one person to another. Encounters along the way reveal different ways of seeing, different ways of understanding. Voices emerge, sharing stories from those held inside Brook House, a large immigration centre on London’s outskirts. Through shifting perspectives, the film examines migration, control, and the space between perception and reality.

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing

Theo Panagopoulos / 2024 / UK / 17:01

When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage. This tender film essay questions the role of image-making as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and the land.