BFMAF New Cinema Awards. Short film programme
nobody’s word – A family convenes exactly 500 years after Charles V grants permission to Lorenzo de Gorrevod ‘to import 4000 Africans into New Spain’. The King’s act marks the escalation of a rupture, with its origins in 1492, that remakes the world and reverberates into the present. This apparent “start of slavery” becomes an occasion to tell the story of one family’s implication across time and space. In nobody’s word Taylor digitises and disintegrates the family archive in order to reframe accounts, destabilise claims and inhabit spaces between fact and fiction, questioning the narrative impulses that inform the stories we tell.
Dir. Camara Taylor | Barbados, Jamaica, United Kingdom | 2025 | 15’ | English with English Subtitles
Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya - Using tectonic plates as imaginary maps Szlam films a constellation of ancient landforms, meditating on the shifting faces of our environments. From the eroded vestiges of volcanic activity to relics of the Gondwana Rainforest, she traces a path along the central eastern ranges of Australia, illuminated in the afterglows of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai eruption in 2022. Shooting on 16mm and editing in-camera, she creates dazzling landscapes through multiple exposures. Whilst vibrations, murmurings and signals of Earth recorded in the region form a soundscape composed by Australian artist Lawrence English.
Dir. Malena Szlam | Australia, Canada | 2024 | 20’ | None
A Thousand Waves Away - The people are in turmoil. The ground from which their enchanted garden grows is trembling. Between bushes and trees, flowerbeds and fountains, everyone has lost their way. Their eyes search for paths, their hands try to remember. Sometimes they spot something. Sometimes they listen. They catch a whisper, a faint promise. They follow the petals downstream. Further.
Dir. Helena Wittmann | Germany | 2025 | 10’ | English
Language of the Entrails – A journey into the entrails of the earth through the digestion of food and images. The viewer is reconnected with interstitial spaces of the body and primal gestures manifesting memories of the past in the present. Language of the Entrails is inspired by the avant-gardist, indigenist Peruvian writer Gamaliel Churata’s novel El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish) where a descent into the underworld reveals a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.
Dir. Luciana Decker Orozco | Bolivia, United States | 2024 | 13’ | No Dialogue