BFMAF programmer Ane Lopez talks to filmmakers Hope Strickland and Omar Chowdhury about the films they showed at BFMAF 2025.

a river holds a perfect memory

• Director: Hope Strickland
• Year: 2024

Water, labour, migration and diasporic memory coalesce in a transporting essay film connecting Jamaica and the UK. Assemblages of archival footage, 16mm and LIDAR scans mobilise water as a medium through which to connect disparate people across the flow of time and against the persistence of colonial erasures.

BAN♡ITS

• Director: Omar Chowdhury
• Year: 2024

Near the lawless eastern border of Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns with a band of washed up ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker. Comically re-enacting their glorified pasts, they confront divergent histories and philosophies of peasant banditry and political resistance in its many unexpected contexts. The resulting para-fiction questions notions of authorship, morality, and representation. When the art world comes calling, who are the real ban♡its?

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