This summer, as part of its 75th-anniversary celebrations and in partnership with the BFI and Rio Cinema, Magnum presents an interrogation of its photojournalistic archives via film in a series of screenings and discussions
Magnum Photos is hosting its first UK Film Festival: Refocusing the Lens: from the Centre to the Margins from July 30–August 3 at the Rio Cinema in Dalston. The festival presents an interrogation of Magnum’s 75-year archive through five film screenings and discussions, each zooming in on issues of ethics, underrepresentation, and positionality behind the lens.
This strand highlights the reflections of those involved in the Sandinista struggle employing personal, state, and photojournalistic archives. Susan Meiselas’s auto-interrogation of her seminal and comprehensive coverage of the movement is complemented a deeply personal meditation on the intimate and familial, in which conflicting (interpretations of) ideologies a reacurring theme. Throughout, repressed memories, movements, and sexualities are met with resistance, manifesting itself in a variety of charged and conscientious ways.
In Pictures from a Revolution(1991, 93m) Susan Meiselas with co-directors Alfred Guzzetti and Richard P Rogers revisits the Sandinista revolutionaries she documented in 1982 book Nicaragua, eliciting ambivalent reflections on the sacrifices of having participated in insurgency, as well as her own experiences of documenting it.
Sex and the Sandinistas (Lucinda Broadbent, 1991, 25m) asks ‘What really happened when the Sandinistas found their soldiers and revolutionary comrades falling in love with the wrong sex?’, providing an unprecedented look into the personal experiences of queer Sandinista members, from safe sex demonstrations to drag shows; from lesbian love poetry to a tribute to Nicaragua’s homosexual indigenous ancestors.
With thanks to the BFI National TV Archive
This event is part of Film Feels Curious, a UK-wide cinema season, supported by the National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network.
Explore all films and events at filmfeels.co.uk.
