LMFF 2018
FILM LIST
Here is the list of confirmed films presented at LMFF 2018.
To know more about the full programme of LMFF 2017 please visit our programme page.
LITTLE PYONGYANG, 2018 (UK)
North Korean defector and a former soldier, Joong-wha Choi, lives with his wife and kids in London. He works in a warehouse on the A3 motorway enjoys the new-found comforts of his British life away from the pressures of the North Korean state. But he remains conflicted, as he desires to return to the land which betrayed him yet undoubtedly remains his true home.
Director: Roxy Rezvany
Length: 24min
Where and When: SOAS, Thursday 29 November, 7.30pm
Screened alongside The Postman and Our Kind of Love. Tickets here
THE POSTMAN, 2017 (UK)
The Postman tells the tale of one Iranian man’s daily journey in London, who writes poetry while delivering the words of others.
Director: Vahid Keshavarz
Length: 7min
Where and when: SOAS, Thursday 29 November, 7.30pm
Screened alongside Little Pyongyang and Our Kind of Love. Tickets here
OUR KIND OF LOVE, UK (2018)
Samira, an Afghan village girl, is on her first date in London.
Director: Azeem Bhati, Elham Ehsas
Length: 16min
Where and when: SOAS, Thursday 29 November, 7.30pm
Screened alongside The Postman and Little Pyongyang. Tickets here
FAREED, 2018 (Canada)
Young Berber dressmaker, Fareed is passionate about poetry and calligraphy. The news in Montreal, where he lives, are constantly filled with stories about the violence and barbaric acts committed in the name of Islam. Fareed has to overcome the way migrants like himself is represented in the media, and fight to become part of society.
Director: Rudy Barichello
Length: 11min
Where and When: Genesis Cinema, Friday 30 November, 6.45pm (screened alongside Another News Story)
ANOTHER NEWS STORY, 2017 (Greece, Germany, Croatia)
In 2016, Europe is going through a so-called “refugee crisis”. As the western world watches the news of migrants entering European borders, this documentary follows those who follow them — the reporters, cameras and media crews who make that journey undocumented.
Director: Orban Wallace
Length: 1h 26min
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Friday 30 December, 6.45pm
A FAMILY TOUR, 2018 (Taiwan, Hong Kong)
One family, three lands. An exiled Chinese film-maker arranges to meet her mother on a travel tour in Taiwan after years of separation. Persecution, family bonds, hopes and fears all blend into a bittersweet trip to remember, as the film explores the complex relationship between China and Hong Kong.
Director: Ying Liang
Length: 1h 47min
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Saturday 1 December 3.30pm
WAJIB, 2017 (Palestine, France)
Shadi is a hipster Palestinian architect living in Italy. He returns to Nazareth for his sister’s wedding, helping his father, Abu, in the tradition of hand-delivering hundreds of invitations to guests. As they spend time together, both father and son have their views on family and tradition challenged, as they grapple with the Palestinian reality of living under occupation.
Director: Annemarie Jacir
Length: 1h 36min
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Saturday 1 December, 6:30pm
THE MERGER, 2018 (Australia)
Screened in collaboration with IOM - UN Migration Agency and Global Migration Film Festival
With the club facing ruin, a country footy coach takes the community and himself on a journey of change as he executes a plan to recruit refugees to ensure the team and the town survives.
Director: Mark Grentell
1h 43min
Where and when: Somerset House, Saturday 1 December, 5:30pm
EL MAR LA MAR, 2017 (USA)
Vast and sprawling, the Sonoran Desert is mostly empty. The landscape is a landscape of death. Traces of human and animal attempts to venture through it accumulate, fade and decompose, until their very existence is inscribed in its topography. This is the route which the poorest of immigrants take. El Mar La Mar takes you through an unforgiving landscape where life and death, beauty and dread, hostile sunlight and glittering starlit nights mingle into a journey which few could live to tell.
Director: Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki
Length: 1h 34min
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 3.30pm
LUCY, 1984 (USA)
Armed with a camera and tape recorder, Verena Rudolph arrives in New York City to search for her aunt Lucy, who disappeared from her Bavarian hometown 50 years ago. Piece by piece, a mosaic of her eccentric life emerges from the tales of her best friends - four women aged between 90 and 100 - and her Black adoptive daughter Luci.
Director: Verena Rudolph
Length: 47mins
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 12:00noon
ELLIS ISLAND, 1982 (USA)
Between 1892 and 1954, over 12 million people arrived at Ellis Island, hoping to enter the United States. For the 280,000 who were turned back, Ellis Island became the “Isle of Tears.” Blending dance, fiction and ghostly imagery, Meredith Monk evokes a dark American legacy.
Director: Meredith Monk
Length: 28min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 12:00noon
VIOLETTA: A PRIVATE LIFE WITH A POLISH MIGRANT, 2012 (UK)
This observational documentary tells the story of a group of Polish immigrants living in Plumstead, London. They share one house, and their individual every day life is connected by the shared space of the Victorian terrace. The ordinary life is seen from the perspective of one woman: Violetta, who expresses her feelings and experiences of migration in intimate interviews, stories and memories.
Director: M+M Hawkins
Length: 49min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 2:30pm
HUSBAND AND WIFE, 2018 (UK)
The wife of a Polish migrant comes to London, determined to complete a task. Her husband had lived in Lewisham for a few years before a tragedy changed their lives for ever. When Beata arrives, she finds an extremely hostile environment which she doesn’t understand. The filmmakers follow her as she navigates the bureaucratic procedures in order to bring her husband’s ashes back home.
Director: M+M Hawkins
Length: 49min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 2:30pm
ROYAL CAFE, 2016 (France)
A Swiss-Tibetan filmmaker moves to Paris, where she wants to make a film about the local Tibetan community. To do so, she starts hanging out at Royal Cafe, one of the meeting places for Tibetans in Paris. Here she meets people with different backgrounds and experiences of being part of the Tibetan diaspora.
Director: Tenzin Dazel & Rémy Caritey
Length: 39min
Where and When: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 5.30pm
ONE CAMBODIAN FAMILY PLEASE FOR MY PLEASURE, 2018 (USA)
A refugee from Czechoslovakia has settled down in the US. When she hears about Cambodians refugees fleeing a dictatorship in their country, she is determined to step in and sponsor a Cambodian family so that they can move into her community.
Director: A. M. Lukas
Length: 13min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 5.30pm
TOGETHER APART, 2018 (Cyprus, Philippines)
Together Apart is an intimate family portrait of two generations of migrant women from the Philippine highlands. 25-year-old Guil Ann follows in mother Carren’s footsteps work as a live-in domestic helper in Cyprus, despite vowing to live a different life than her mother. Having lived apart for most of their lives, mother and daughter are reunited for the first time in years - only to be separated again when Carren gets arrested by the Cypriot immigration police.
Director: Maren Wickwire
Length: 57min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sun 2 Dec, 5.30pm
ASMAT, 2015 (Italy)
A video to commemorate the victims of the disaster that occurred on October 3, 2013, off the coast of Lampedusa. Its intention is to force the institutions and civil society, in the words of the director, to “name each and every one, to make us aware of how many names lost their bodies on one single day, in the Mediterranean sea”.
Director: Dagmawi Yimer
Length: 17min
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 6.30pm (screened alongside The Order of Things)
THE ORDER OF THINGS, 2017 (Italy)
An Italian police officer from the European immigration task force is sent to Libya to strike a deal to turn jails into publicly-funded “hot spots”, where migrants can be kept as authorities process their cases. Here he befriends Swada, a Somali woman trying to reach her family in Rome.
Director: Andrea Segre
Length: 1h 55mins
Where and when: Genesis Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 6.30pm
RETURNEE, 2017 (Kazakhstan)
Saparkul has decided to return to Kazakhstan, the home country of his father. Because his father is old, he has chosen to give up his position as muezzin in their local mosque in Afghanistan and has already received all the necessary documents by the Kazakh authorities. Together with his wife and daughter, the two men start the long journey from Afghanistan to Kazakhstan. However, the country of Kazakhstan has changed since Saparkul’s father left. And as his health slowly deteriorates, the family is forced to make a living in a place whose people mostly avoid them.
Director: Sabit Kurmanbekov
Length: 1h 35min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Sunday 2 December, 8pm
IUVENTA, 2018 (Germany, Mediterranean)
The documentary Iuventa relates the events of a crucial year in the lives of a group of young European men and women all involved in different ways in the Jugend Rettet humanitarian project, starting from the first voyage of the Iuventa ship in the Mediterranean Sea to the heavy accusations that led to the seizure of the vessel more than a year later.
Director: Michele Cinque
Length: 1h 24min
Where and when: SOAS, Monday 3 December, 7pm
THE IUVENTA, 2017 (UK, Mediterranean)
Since the end of 2016, culminating in summer 2017, a growing campaign of delegitimisation and criminalisation has systematically targeted NGOs engaged in search and rescue.
The ship Iuventa, of the German NGO Jugend Rettet, was seized by the Italian judiciary under suspicion of ‘assistance to illegal migration’ and collusion with smugglers during three different rescue operations. The seizure came only days after the NGO, along with several others, had refused to sign a ‘code of conduct’ that would have dangerously limited their activities. The video presented here offers a counter-investigation of the authorities’ version of these three episodes, and a refutation of their accusations.
Director: Forensic Architecture
Length: 33min
Where and when: SOAS, Monday 3 December, 7pm (screened alongside Iuventa)
BEFORE I FORGET, 2018 (Germany, Syria)
If you could no longer return to the place where your memories were made, would you still recall them in the same way? Razan Hassan takes us with her on an autobiographical journey trying to recover her only record of the past, while she tries to forge a new identity following her displacement from Syria.
Director: Razan Hassan
Length: 11min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Monday 3 December, 7pm (screened alongside Revenir)
REVENIR, 2018 (France, Ghana, Togo)
Revenir follows Kumut Imesh, a refugee from the Ivory Coast now living in France, as he returns to the African continent and attempts to retrace the journey that he took when he was forced to flee civil war in his country… But this time with a camera in his hand.
Director: David Fedele & Kumut Imesh
Length: 1h 15min
Where and when: Deptford Cinema, Monday 3 December, 7pm
ONLY MY VOICE, 2017 (Greece)
In transit through Athens, four women from the Middle East share their stories. They all left their countries at different times in their life and for different reasons. As they preferred not to be identified, only their voices are heard. Stories of up-rootedness and contradictory sensation and personal experience of freedom will gradually echo each other; resonating and interacting with the city of Athens.
Director: Myriam Rey
Length: 12min
Where and when: The Lexi Cinema, Monday 3 December, 6:30pm
TASTE OF CEMENT, 2017 (Germany, Lebanon)
A portrait of workers in exile. An empathetic encounter with people who have lost their past and their future, locked in the recurring present. The director creates an essay documentary of Syrian construction workers building new skyscrapers in Beirut on the ruins caused by the Lebanese civil war. At the same time their own houses are being bombed in Syria. Mute and imprisoned in the cement underground, they must endure until the new day arrives where the hammering and welding drowns out their nightmares.
Director: Ziad Kalthoum
Length: 1h 15min
Where and when: The Lexi Cinema, Monday 3 December, 6:30pm
I AM GOLDEN KAREN, 2018 (Thailand, Burma)
I Am Golden Karen tells the story of Thaawa, a young rapper from Burma’s Karen State who is part of an entire generation that has grown up in Thailand but nurtures a strong desire to return to their motherland. The film follows Thaawa as he negotiates his identity from being a young migrant arriving in Bangkok to becoming a father. He questions his responsibilities towards the family and his desire to both settle in Thailand and return to Karen State.
Directors: Maui Druez, Preben Verledens
Length: 1h 13min
Where and When: Genesis Cinema, Tue 4 Dec, 6.45pm
BABYLON, 1980 (UK)
London, 1970s. DJ for Brixton reggae sound system 'Ital Lion Sound', Blue is getting ready for the local sound system showdown with rival crew, Jah Shaka. But as the day of the competition approaches, Blue suddenly sees his life falling apart. After losing his job, he's beaten up by the police on a trumped-up charge, and then discovers that all of his sound equipment has been destroyed by local white residents. Tired of having to deal with the constant daily pressures of racial-hatred and intolerance, Blue finally decides to take matters into his own hands.
Director: Franco Rosso
Length: 1h 30min
Where and when: Migration Museum, Monday 3 December [time tbc]
ISLAND, 2018 (Italy)
A migrant in Italy relies on Skype and phone calls to maintain relations with his family.
Director: Ege Göksu
Length: 3min
Where and When: Peckham Springs, Wednesday 5 December, 7.30pm
Screened alongside Twin Flower. Tickets here
TWIN FLOWER, 2018 (Italy)
A young woman from Italy and a young man from Ivory Coast are running away from their ghosts. They meet each other in a small town in Sardinia - and find out that what unites them is more powerful than what separates them.
Director: Laura Luchetti
Length: 1h 36min
Where and when: Peckham Springs, Wednesday 5 December, 7.30pm
Screened alongside Island. Tickets here.