Skip to main content

The RAI FILM Festival will take place in Bristol (UK) from 11 to 15 June 2025, and online (available worldwide) from 16 June – 16 July, including the online film conference from 1 to 4 July.

Search our film database
Filters

19 films found

  1. Our bodies are semi-permeable. All over the world, stories are being told about heroes who magically “close” their bodies, so as to become invincible. This film follows one such story,...

  2. Seeing ‘Holy Hustler’, the 2009 film made in Botswana, local viewers respond and discuss it with the filmmaker Richard Werbner in 2011. ‘Counterpoint Botswana’ captures the reception by home audience....

  3. The first in the Forum Follies series, ‘Counterpoint One’ pitches the ethnographic filmmaker Richard Werbner into debate with audiences for his film ‘Holy Hustlers’ (2009), from a rough to a...

  4. The second in the ‘Forum Follies’ series, ‘Counterpoint Two’ pitches the ethnographic filmmaker Richard Werbner into debate with audiences for his film ‘Encountering Eloyi’ (2008), from a rough to a...

  5. An autoethnographic phenomenology of blackness in Berlin via Ethiopia. The film explores the historical and ongoing relationship between the so-called West and Africa. A brother who lives north of the...

  6. A refugee known only as Alberto flies from Athens to Brussels on a fake passport. Three years later, a small crew from Berlin tries to make a film by shooting...

  7. Between 1960 and 1992, the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Brian Moser made four films concerning indigenous peoples of northwest Amazonia: “Piraparana” (1960), “War of the Gods” (1971), “A Small Family Business”...

  8. For the first time Jero sees herself on film as she watches ‘A Balinese Trance Séance’. Her spontaneous comments provide insights into her feelings while possessed, her understanding of her...

  9. A singular anthropological essay film that observes the various nets we find across different contexts in Bahia (from fishing nets to delicate nets of lace), and the emotions and sensations...

  10. Made in Trenchtown’ is the product of a collaboration with three teenagers from Trenchtown – a ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica, controlled by drug lords. As Philomena, Diamond and Stephan hold...

  11. This is a collaborative documentary about arts, culture and everyday life inside a prison for minors. It was shot during a photography and video workshop with young inmates at the...

  12. What is it that you film when you film a spirit? I was brought up to believe that spirits do not exist. Years of research on an afro-Brazilian spirit possession...

  13. The film recounts the life of children living on the street in Gondar, Ethiopia, by witnessing the interaction between two children and the filmmaker. The entire film was shot in...

  14. A decade since Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war, from the ashes rises a new dawn of creativity in audio-visual media. Inspired by Jean Rouch’s ‘shared anthropology’ and ‘ethno-fiction’, Shooting Freetown...

  15. Transfiction explores ‘ethnofiction’ – an experimental ethnographic documentary film style in which the participants collaborate with the filmmaker to act out their own and others’ life experiences in improvisations. The...

  16. Travel

    Directed by Nick Mai

    (This version of the film is edited using a single screen. For the split screen version see ‘Travel – double screen version’). Joy left Nigeria to help her family after...

  17. (This version of the film uses a split-screen device throughout. For the single screen version see ‘Travel’). Joy left Nigeria to help her family after her father’s death. She knew...

  18. At Jie cattle camps in Uganda men often gather under a special tree to make leather and wooden goods and talk, relax, and sleep. This brilliant ethnographic documentary by renowned...

  19. Although the events around which this film was planned were the final mortuary rites for Les Angabarraparra, the subject of the film became interaction. Interaction between the anthropologist Les Hiatt...

RAI FILM Festival 2025

The next RAI FILM Festival will take place in person from 27-30 March 2025 at the Watershed Cinema and the Arnolfini International Centre for Contemporary Arts in Bristol (UK) and online throughout the month of April 2025.