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The Body Won’t Close
Directed by Mattijs van de Port
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,...
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Counterpoint Botswana
Directed by Richard Werbner
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....
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Counterpoint One
Directed by Richard Werbner
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...
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Counterpoint Two
Directed by Richard Werbner
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...
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Emails to My Little Sister
Directed by Solomon Mekonen
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...
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Forget Alberto For Now
Directed by Beina Xu
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...
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Ignacio’s Legacy
Directed by Titus Fossgard-Moser
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”...
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Made in Trenchtown
Directed by Ester Maagdenberg
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...
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Out of Focus
Directed by Adrian Arcé, Antonio Zirión
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...
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The Possibility of Spirits
Directed by Mattijs van de Port
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...
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Room 11, Ethiopia Hotel
Directed by Itsushi Kawase
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...
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Shooting Freetown
Directed by Kieran Hanson
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...
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Transfiction
Directed by Johannes Sjøberg
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...
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Travel (double screen)
Directed by Nick Mai
(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...
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Under the Men’s Tree
Directed by David MacDougall, Judith MacDougall
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...
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Waiting for Harry
Directed by Kim McKenzie
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.
