WELCOME: Foyle Film Intercultural & Anti-Racism Festival marks its 15th year with an expanded virtual programme of films and special cinema-related events tackling a wide range of topics pertaining to all forms of discrimination, prejudice, human rights abuses, inequality, and environmental challenges.
The festival aims to encourage participants to value, and embrace diversity in all its forms - whether race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, migrants, minorities, those with physical disabilities - as well as encouraging awareness of local and global issues like war and the environment. The long-term objectives and outcomes are to help promote tolerance and inclusion, and to encourage debate around sensitive issues, such as mental health, suicide, and all forms of abuse.
FFF’s Intercultural & Anti-Racism Festival also aims to increase access and participation by targeting the most disadvantaged and hardest to reach individuals and groups in the community - including the unemployed, the elderly, carers, single parents, minorities and those living with physical disabilities and other conditions such as Dementia and Autism. Such groups often feel excluded from the arts as programmes are not generally targeted to meet their specific needs and requirements.
Women from all walks of life represent a strong presence in this year’s festival, with programme highlights including Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche. This fascinating film charts the life of Poly Styrene the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band. Misogyny, racism, and mental illness plagued Poly’s life, while their lasting trauma scarred her daughter Celeste’s childhood and the pair’s relationship.
While The Euphoria Of Being charts the life of Eva Fahidi who returned home to Hungary after WWII. At the age of 20 Eva had survived Auschwitz Birkenau, while 49 members of her family were murdered, including her mother, father, and little sister. At the age 90, Eva was asked to participate in a dance theatre performance about her life's journey, and this film documents that event.
Ahead Of The Curve is the story of one of the most influential women in lesbian history, and the impact her work continues to have today. Growing up, Franco Stevens never saw any representation of queer women - she didn’t even know it was possible for a woman to be gay. When she realised she was a lesbian, it changed the course of her life. In 1990, Franco created a safe place for lesbians in the form of Curve magazine.
The Rape Of Recy Taylor is a devastating documentary about a 24-year old black mother and sharecropper who was gang raped by six white men in 1944 Alabama. She spoke up at the time and identified her attackers. The NAACP sent civil rights activist Rosa Parks, their chief investigator to look into the case. Her representation and the community's rallied support triggered an unprecedented outcry for justice. Recy Taylor spoke up long before the #MeToo movement.
I Am Belmaya is the story of a young woman dominated by her husband, her family and society. Belmaya is desperate for independence, but she is a daughter of Nepal, where men make the decisions and women keep their mouths shut. Here, in one of the poorest nations on earth, women are daughters, wives, mothers, dependents, victims, slaves. Rarely individuals in their own right. When she was 14 Belmaya participated in the My World, My View photo project, and was inspired to become a photographer. However, that dream was stifled when the home she lived in locked away her camera. Then she gets a second chance, as she trains in documentary filmmaking. Picking up the camera once more, her old spark returns. As she grows in confidence and ability, she confronts her husband and makes two short films, turning from subject to co-director of her story.
Sisters With Transistors is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music.
Other programme highlights include Gunda an enchanting film in which master filmmaker Viktor Kossakovsky reminds us that we share our planet with billions of other animals. Through encounters with a mother sow (the eponymous Gunda), two ingenious cows, and a scene-stealing, one-legged chicken, Kossakovsky movingly recalibrates our moral universe, reminding us of the inherent value of life and the mystery of all animal consciousness, including our own.
Minari is a tender and sweeping story about what roots us, and follows a Korean-American family that moves to a tiny Arkansas farm in search of their own American Dream. Amidst the instability and challenges of this new life in the rugged Ozarks, Minari shows the undeniable resilience of family and what really makes a home.
Foyle Film Intercultural & Anti-Racism Festival is a project of the Nerve Centre, and is funded by the Department for Communities through Northern Ireland Screen.
Bernie McLaughlin
Festival Director & Programmer
