We are excited to announce the selected films and programme schedule for the 8th Braziers International Film Festival!
Featuring several curated programmes of international short films, this year we’re delighted to also welcome special guest programmes from two international partner festivals: TerraLenta International Environmental Film Festival, Italy and Mientras tanto CINE experimental film festival, Uruguay.
In addition to our barn screenings, we are excited to have present three installation works in the house and grounds of Braziers Park, running throughout the weekend: here and not here, Andrea Luka Zimmerman; The Walnut of Knowledge, Niyaz Saghari; The Phalanx, Benjamin Balcom.
We are also delighted to present an expanded live performance in the Braziers campsite field: Friends Take a Kite-Flying Journey,
Gwen SenHui Chen & Owen Ramsay (presented by Gwen SenHui Chen & Nathan Taylor).
The festival runs from Aug 28 – 30, 2026, and tickets can booked here.
We hope you can join us for a weekend of cinema, conversation and community!
8th BRAZIERS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Fri Aug 28, 16:00 – Sun Aug 30, 16:00
* filmmaker in attendance
INSTALLATIONS
Open from Fri Aug 28 16:00 – Sun Aug 30 16:00
Cowshed, Braziers Park orchard:
here and not here
Andrea Luka Zimmerman | 29:37′ | Palestine/UK *
A film diary, in 15 short dispatches, from a place that both does and does not exist – a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by, conflict. Filmed in the Occupied West Bank and Occupied Golan Heights, here and not here seeks a poetics of expression that acknowledges the perennial challenges of Occupation. Charting encounter – with and between people and place and the more than human – here and not here celebrates not the ‘cruel optimism’ of a false hope but rather celebrates the lived experience of a profoundly precious yet always precarious ‘everyday life’.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.
Study, Braziers Park house:
The Walnut of Knowledge
Niyaz Saghari | 26:00′ | 2024 | Iran/UK *
A layered home movie following Jonah and Niyaz’s yearly journeys from the UK to Iran. Part road movie, part reflection, it traces Jonah’s search for his roots and ancestors, while Niyaz contemplates the meaning of home, belonging, and some unanswered questions. At the heart of it all, an 80-year-old walnut tree in the garden stands as a quiet keeper of wisdom — if you look deeply enough.
Niyaz Saghari is a UK-based Iranian filmmaker. Her directorial work, often hand-processed, examines the cultural histories of her homeland with an emphasis on memories and the mundane daily experiences that are considered insignificant.
Living room, Braziers Park house:
The Phalanx
Benjamin Balcom | 13:30′ | 2025 | USA
Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association, the frictions that give way to fracture. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Ben Balcom is a filmmaker and educator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he is a professor of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His most recent films explore the histories and afterlives of radical social ideals and communal living.
Barn Screenings:
Fri Aug 28, 17:00
ENTANGLED LANDSCAPES
programmer Nick Jordan
Errabonda
Emma Harris | 20′ | 2026 | Denmark
Set on an Italian organic farm, Errabonda uses 16mm experimental film techniques and plant-based chemistry to explore how soil, weeds, and microbes leave their traces on both film and field, reimagining agriculture as a space of coexistence across species.
Material River
Fiona Sinéad Brehony | 18.29′ | 2026 | UK
A sensorial meditation on loss and belonging, this film follows the artists of Many Hands Craft Collective as they look to North Manchester’s River Irk for answers about their own heritage, in the shadow of Britain’s largest regeneration project.
The silence of pomegranates *
Clara Baj | 9:20′ | 2025 | France/Italy
In a coastal town in Calabria, southern Italy, a woman who prefers to remain anonymous breaks the silence surrounding the issue of abortion in the region.
Stallion y la Bola de Cristal
Christian Avilés | 18:21′ | 2026 | Spain
In his dark, silent room, a secluded teenager sick with a burning desire casts a spell. As violent visions warp his reality, a bubble threatens to burst; something must break.
Fri Aug 28, 19:30
UFOLDING ARCHIVES
programmer Julia Makojnik
Overwork
Céline Berger | 10:10′ | 2025 | Germany
The found-footage short film Overwork offers a personal reinterpretation of a collection of educational 16mm films from the German Employment Agency.
Commons
David Blandy | 15:00′ | 2025 | UK
Told through the perspectives of animals, fossils, and a broken mobile phone, Commons is a layered visual tapestry that connects past and present, human and non-human, through stories rooted in the local landscape.
How to Download a Forest
Annette Jacob | 18:21′ | 2025 | Portugal/India
The film speculates the endlessness of gathering knowledge about the natural world and questions what is altered when we transplant it into digital systems.
Unsold Copies
Stefan Koutzev | 19:45′ | 2025 | Germany
In light of computer-aided manufacturing and the excessive overexploitation of natural resources, Unsold Copies longs for a moment of rest from the assembly line, while mankind continually buries itself in the remnants of a material world.
Fri Aug 28, 21:30
Mientras tanto CINE
Mientras tanto CINE presents a selection of Uruguayan experimental cinema from the latest editions:
Nuova generazione | Abril Aguirre Espel, Natalia Candia, Bruno Fernández, Victoria Pérez | 1:00′ | 2021 | Uruguay
Unfolds in a completely extraordinary amusement park (montevidean Parque Rodó), where the image and sounds engage in a dialogue, resulting in a Viaje Mágico (or magical journey).
Maquinaciones (Machinations)
Diego Peña | 7:00′ | 2018 | Uruguay
Images and sounds collide, intertwining desires, landscapes, and everyday settings. Live AV performance recording.
The restless sea
Agustín Fernández Lombardo | 11:00 | 2024 | Uruguay *
When my father died, we took his ashes to the sea. We were ghosts, in the middle of summer. A personal story about the reconstruction of memory.
Discovering mayonnaise
Silvana Camors | 3:00′ | 2017 | Uruguay
A series of photographs discovered 30 years later. A midday that the photographs clearly show happened. Finding them evokes memories, even if they are not consciously recalled.
Abrazos, João
Fernanda Méndez & Narella Correa | 12:00 | 2025 | Uruguay
“I try to draw closer to a man I know only through absence: my grandfather. Amidst preserved letters, a few photographs, and the memories of others, I explore the gaps and silences that make up the life of a man I never knew.”
Shameless memories: I am a lesbian from this country
Rocío Llambí Scirgalea | 8:00′ | 2024 | Uruguay/España
A photograph titled “I am a lesbian from this country” with a covered person in the center of the image. A first-person search through fragments of archives, geographies, eras, and stories that unfold to find the protagonist of that photograph.
Uruguay is not a river
Daniel Yafalián | 17:00 | 2021 | Uruguay
Short film made from 16mm film shot by the Uruguayan primary education institute (CEIP) in
Using natural deteriorations, scratches, fungi and noises of original 1960s archival material, the different layers of sound, atmospheres, music, text and their interaction with the image propose questions about the very idea of nation and identity.
Sat Aug 29, 11:00
COLLECTIVE MEMORIES
programmer Dave Griffiths
Bentwaters Frequency Test
Lewis Heriz | 3:47′ | 2026 | Latvia/UK *
A rural military outpost; semantic collapse encoded – a transmission – an emergency.
Happiness
Firat Yücel | 18:00′ | 2025 | Türkiye
An urgent desktop diary made at the intersection of a hectic digital landscape and the inner violence of modern colonization.
In the Maritime Frequencies *
Greta M Snider | 15:00′ | 2025 | USA
Approaches climate change and its attendant crises from a context of the hyper-localized – in a particular stretch of San Francisco shoreline, in the deepest imaginations of its residents, and hand-processed with developers mixed from bay water, ubiquitous fennel, and detergent by-waste.
Mystics after Modernism
Karen Cunningham | 6.05′ | 2012 | UK
Filmed at the Sighthill Stone Circle (built in 1979) in North Glasgow which was the first astronomically aligned stone circle to be built in Great Britain for over 3,000 years. Four large residential tower blocks were adjacent to the site of stone circle.
Water to the Wall
Becky Manson | 13:00′ | 2025 | UK
A portrait of an island community through time, where the sea has always defined life. As the elements continue to shape Orkney, Water To The Wall uses tidal rhythms to explore how islanders live alongside the ebb and flow.
Sat Aug 29, 14:00
DISSOLVING CROSSINGS
programmer Ane Lopez
To Summon A Seer
Alan Medina | 7:46′ | 2025 | USA
Apertured voyages, orbs of light, and memories of migration summon a clairvoyant into the big city, confounding a sense of place through blurred and distant recollection.
the water was here
Sophie Sherman & Némo Camus | 15:00′ | 2025 | Belgium
Portrait of an urban marsh born from a human flaw, where life invents new forms of coexistence.
Shards
Luciana Decker Orozco | 14:17′ | 2025 | Bolivia
The film approaches objects as unstable fragments, remnants of broader worlds, like mirrors that only allow themselves to be glimpsed momentarily.
Kontrewers
Zuza Banasińska | 21:00′ | 2026 | France/Netherlands/Poland
A confrontation with what we tend to repress: death, old age, and the historical traumas that continue to inhabit our present.
Sat Aug 29, 17:00
OBSERVED ECOLOGIES
programmer Nick Jordan
Common Pear
Gregor Božič | 15:00′ | 2025 | Slovenia
In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate crisis, a team of scientists analyse the archival footage of farmers from the past, in an attempt to understand their connection to the land.
Pomo D’Orographies
Francesca Paola Beltrame | 7:49′ | 2025 | Italy
A short film that traces the inter-connection between migratory and trade of canned tomatoes from Italy and Ghana. The film layers animations and intimate conversations, to shed light on the multiple hidden lifeworlds nestled within the tomato, threading its colonial roots to its neo-colonial present.
Letter 1 / AIR
Miia Autio | 15:35′ | 2024 | Finland
A correspondence with a Beninese diviner draws the artist into Vodun’s invisible world, where dream guide and wind carries the story forward.
Am I peat-compatible?
Manon Awst | 8:00′ | 2025 | UK
A performative investigation at Cors Gyfelog, a quaking bog in north Wales, created as part of Manon Awst’s Future Wales Fellowship.
I Petrify
Rhona Mühlebach | 11:10′ | 2026 | Austria
Borrowing the form of a press conference, I Petrify follows a snail who longs to turn to stone to outlast a collapsing world – a reflection on paralysis and self-preservation in the slippages between virtual and real.
Sat Aug 29, 19:30
TerraLenta
TerraLenta International Environmental Film Festival (Italy) presents a special guest programme of films from their festival editions:
How it begins
Chloé Wasp | 12:37′ | 2025 | France
A fire woman preventively burns forests in North Carolina in order both to regenerate the land and avert devastating wild blazes. In this gradual plunge into the flames, the act of setting fire becomes an intimate and direct experience of the elements.
Crossing the Divide
Eva Zanettin & Raghav Pasricha | 15:00′ | 2024 | Italy
An intimate journey with the Bauls and Fakirs of Bengal, where song and spirituality become acts of resistance and testimonies of humanism, love, and non-violence.
Mandzarsoa
Germain Le Carpentier | 15:50′ | 2025 | France/Mayotte
After Cyclone Chido devastated Mayotte, the Mandzarsoa neighborhood began rebuilding from day one. Without water or electricity, the population survives in total indifference to the outside world.
Megacicli
Davide Barletti | 18:22 | 2025 | Italy *
In Basilicata, every year a herd of cattle undertakes the ancient cyclical ritual of transhumance, moving from the summer pastures down to the valley for the winter. A radio amateur follows the caravan with his mobile station, searching for a signal in the ether, listening to the megacycles of sound waves, as the world seems to be heading toward the abyss.
Sun Aug 30, 10:00
Braziers Park campsite field:
Friends Take a Kite-Flying Journey
Gwen SenHui Chen & Owen Ramsay | 60’ | 2024 – ongoing | UK *
A flying journey delving into the process of making, testing Wau Bulan and navigating the landscape together, making notes and drawings; then we carry them into the flying field accompanied by a recorded wau making session with Pak Anuar.
Presented by Gwen SenHui Chen & Nathan Taylor
Sun Aug 30, 11:30
TRANSIENT SOUNDSCAPES
programmer Mariana Castiñeiras
A Spider’s Lunch & Other Sounds
Liberty Smith | 23:55 | 2025 | UK *
Set in Port Talbot, south Wales, as the steelworks fall silent, A Spider’s Lunch & Other Sounds follows local men’s walk-and-talk groups on immersive listening walks, as they explore mental health, memory, and the transformative power of sound.
diario de verano
Francisca Duran & Cristal Buemi | 4.35′ | 2025 | Canada
Combines stop motion animation and phytograms to explore neighborhood flora, land, and our Latinx kinship in Tkaronto.
Insecticide
Anna Best | 3:45′ | 2024 | UK *
A summer of dead insects became a macabre protest march.
Towers 1
Gerald Habarth | 1.30′ | 2026 | USA
Common electrical towers and wires brought to life through animation, revealing their inherent structural and geometric beauty, as well as their strangeness: giant steel sentinels in the landscape carrying electric currents – like signals – between thousands of humans.
Tuktuit : Caribou
Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre | 15:00′ | 2025 | Canada
An experimental documentary created with handmade and manufactured emulsions exploring the close and
enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichens and land use.
Water Palimpsest
Jaewon Yoo | 7:43′ | 2026 | Belgium/South Korea
An essay film excavating hidden waterways and buried family memories to trace inherited grief of a Korean War massacre.
Sun Aug 30, 14:00
RADICAL INSTINCTS
programmer Joseph Lang
Ż
Rachel Micallef Somerville | 16:27 | 2025 | Malta
The Maltese Islands have long been marked by conquest. The fragile landscape that remains is being rapidly erased by greed and corruption. An elegy for land and sea, an elegy for land and Ż.
SixSeven, or a Circular System of Social Welfare
Nisha Duggal | 3.30′ | 2026 | UK *
A co-production with a group of school children from Star Lane Primary in East London. Sixseven Or a Circular System of Social Welfare explores community, freedom and the agency of the hand.
Contractions
Lynne Sachs | 12:00′ | 2024 | USA
In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the country. The film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic.
BRANCHES FROM CONCRETE
Zhenyu Zhou | 13:50′ | 2026 | China
A mysterious spectral figure wanders the ruins of a future that never materialised.
Midden
Dylan Serventi | 25:00′ | 2026 | UK
Daisy is coming down from a party the night before when she finds a mysterious glass orb in a children’s play area. As she is drawn deeper into the woodland on the fringes of suburbia, she discovers a strange world, and it begins to seem that the orb has some inexplicable power over the forest.
Sun, Aug 30, 16:00
THE GLAISTER AWARD
Voted by the audience, the festival presents a film-maker with The Glaister Award. Named after the founders of Braziers, Norman & Dorothy Glaister, the award recognises a film which ‘makes a positive contribution to social development and action in the world today.’
The award winner receives homemade produce from the Braziers permaculture garden. The winning film is screened after the award ceremony. See previous winners here.
