UK premieres
Wheelchair accessible | English subtitles | Pay-what-you-can tickets (£2–12)
If the ticket or other costs, such as childcare or transport, make this screening unaffordable, please see details of our Audience Access Fund.
Following last year’s Audience Award for Alex Milic’s Consul of Nowhereland (Montenegro), this year’s competition brings 14 new titles — from Poland and Iran to Uzbekistan and Greece. Once again, you — our audience! — will vote for the winner.
Our first block moves between sharp, playful storytelling and intimate testimonies, bridging the gap between the personal and the political. A young girl carries her uprooted home in her sleeve, a mother and daughter confront the scars of patriarchal society together, a remote train station becomes the stage for an absurdist play. Together, these films form a choir of voices in search of belonging in the face of displacement, oppression and exclusion.
Content notes: war, blood, dead body, discussion of transphobia and homophobia, state oppression, trauma and grief, discussion of sexualised violence, depiction of ableism
Access notes: loud noises and music, flickering lights
Selected by Natalia Guzevataya, misha irek and Dylan Beck
Programme (In Order of Screening)
Bunny Decides to Go (Dovşan getmək qərarına gəlir) by Vusala Hajiyeva, Azerbaijan, 2022
Autokar by Sylwia Szkiłądź, Belgium/France, 2025
Three Women Named Svetlana (Tri žene po imenu Svetlana) by Natalia Boorsma, Serbia/Netherlands, 2024
Nudity (Nagota) by Sabina Bakaeva, Uzbekistan/France, 2025
Us, The Sea and The Sad End by Małgorzata Rybak, Poland, 2023
Rock Berkut by Tamerlan Almanov, Qazaqstan*, 2025
Cleaner by Kostas Gerampinis, Greece, 2024
* In 2023, a Latin-based alphabet gained co-official status with the Soviet-era Cyrillic script in Qazastan. Full transition to the new script is expected by 2031. The switch is part of the slow process of decolonisation and is aimed to right the wrong of Soviet cultural policy that subjected the people of Qazaqstan (and other colonised groups) to multiple forced changes of script, first from the Central Asian variety of the Arabic script to Latin, then from Latin to modified Cyrillic – all in under 15 years.
The official spelling of the country’s name in the new Latin script is Qazaqstan. This spelling more accurately reflects the phonology of the Qazaq language. By contrast, the Soviet-defined standard spelling of “Kazakhstan” is based on Russian phonetics and Soviet cultural policy. Initially, the Soviet state mislabelled Qazaqstan as “Kirghizstan” (the Kyrgyz people whose lands were initially included in Soviet Kirghiztan, were termed “Kara-Kirghiz”), because the pronunciation of the word “Qazaq” was considered too similar to “Cossac” when spoken in Russian. Popular opposition in Central Asia forced the USSR to end the linguistic erasure and conflation of Qazaq and Kyrgyz identities. But Soviet nomenclature deliberately replaced the second “q” in Qazaq with the softer Russian “kh” [«х»] in order to amplify the phonetic difference between the words “Kazakh” and “Cossac” when spoken in Russian.