Bristol Radical Film Festival

20/06/2025

Important announcement: we are now on Bluesky! Please follow us there, our handle is bristolradfilmfest.bsky.social or here's a handy link.

The Bristol Radical Film Festival showcases a radically different kind of cinema. dates to be announced soon…

15/05/2025

🚨ANNOUNCEMENT!🚨

Bristol Radical Film Festival Returns in Autumn 2025, and our short film submission page is now LIVE! More info and link in stories. Please share!

15/05/2025

Our call for submissions of short films (up to 15 minutes) for our annual International Showcase Session is now open.

Submit via FilmFreeway:
https://filmfreeway.com/BristolRadicalFilmFestival

13/05/2025

07/02/2025

Taking as its starting point the famous European folktale of The Musicians of Bremen, first published in Germany in 1819 by the Brothers Grimm, How I Became a Communist uses this old story to reflect on the decline of a unified left wing political movement in Europe since the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871.
The film also depicts the daily life of an elderly woman running a farm in the Irish countryside on the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic is observed in a portrait marked by stillness and a meticulous chronicling of the everyday.

31/01/2025

21/01/2025

𝗧𝘂𝗲 𝟮𝟭 𝗝𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 // 𝟮𝟬:𝟬𝟬

𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐃𝐀𝐈 𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐌 by Kamal Aljafari 🎬

Composed of archival fragments, 𝘼 𝙁𝙄𝘿𝘼𝙄 𝙁𝙄𝙇𝙈 reconstructs the visual memory of Palestine, reclaiming images that were plundered from the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut in 1982.

In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images.

Taking this as a premise, 𝘼 𝙁𝙄𝘿𝘼𝙄 𝙁𝙄𝙇𝙈 aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history.

It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.

Tickets: £5

cubecinema.com

16/12/2024

CUBE FOCUS: KAMAL ALJAFARI
as real as it is abstract and phantasmagorical
dir: Kamal Aljafari, Palestine, 60 mins, Cert:18 (TBA)
-
Wed 18 December // 20:00

Tickets: £5

BOOK TICKETS

To what extent can the real and figural materiality of an image become an abstraction or, potentially more, a spectrum? The question evokes both aesthetic and ethical problems which, in Kamal Aljafari’s cinema, converge towards a territory as real as it is abstract and phantasmagorical: Palestine. While Aljafari’s cinema stems from the observation of an everyday life that not only coexists within, but inhabits ruin itself, he subsequently transforms these images into trails, echoes, smudges, blurs and, in his most radical recent films, pixels uncapturable by notions of the real.

09/12/2024

Highly recommend forthcoming feature at Cube Cinema on Palestinian film maker Kamal Aljafari. All ticket sales go to

15/10/2024

HUGE thank you to everyone who came to BRFF 2024, watched the films, contributed to the discussions and just generally helping to another successful event! Until next year…

08/10/2024

1948 WHAT WE KNEW is an autobiographical documentary filmed on a smartphone in London at the start of the Israeli state's murderous attack on Gaza, three Jewish women of European heritage - Ruth, Gail and the director, all born in 1948, the same year as the Israeli state - discuss the (fairy) storie...

07/10/2024

Our final screening this year is Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Oct 13th 7pm at .

USA, 2020. Dir. Eliza Hittman. 95m

Her journey, her choice. A portrayal of a 17 year old in rural Pennsylvania. Faced with the terrifying realities of an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support in rural USA Autumn will embark in a journey, alongside her cousin Skylar, across state lines to New York City on a fraught journey to get an abortion.

Even before the current attack on reproductive rights in the USA and the rest of the world, the film presents a matter-of-fact portrait of two young women in a difficult but all-too-believable situation.
“[The] hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation” (NY Times).

Tickets via our website or in stories.