The SLG’s longstanding South By South Film programme, dedicated to African cinema, spotlights North African film as part of our current exhibition, Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill. This focus reflects Barrada’s deep commitment to the region and to North African cinema, most notably through founding La Cinémathèque de Tanger in the iconic 1930s building of Cinema Rif.

In dialogue with Barrada’s work and her ongoing explorations of plant histories and colonial legacies, this programme gathers films that highlight the garden as a site entangled in histories of dispossession and displacement while offering a fertile ground for resistance and renewal.

Moving through a series of landscapes, both real and imagined, these works retrace acts of care, remembrance, and radical storytelling. Some reclaim found footage or re-examine botanical archives, whilst others attend to intimate gestures, rituals, or unfamiliar species quietly growing in unexpected places. Together, these films ask: what do we cultivate in our gardens, of memory, of ritual, of life itself? Which roots do we inherit, and which do we carry forward?

This screening evening is curated by Kimiā an experimental film, photography, and media art collective based in Casablanca, Morocco.

PROGRAMME

Yasmina Benabderrahmane, Le Bouquet, 2022 (2 min,)

A short film capturing the director’s grandmother harvesting flowers, revealing intimacy and intergenerational acts of care through fragmented images.

Theo Panagopoulos, The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing, 2024 (17 min)

A Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland reclaims a rarely seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wildflowers, reflecting on image-making as both testimony and violence in human-land entanglements.

Kadeem Oak & Jonn Gale, Pressed Flowers of the Empire, 2025 (12 min)

An essay film recontextualising Kew Botanical Gardens’ archival footage while reflecting on colonial legacies, human-plant relationships and institutional histories.

Nour Ouayda, The Secret Garden, 2023 (27 min)

Following Camelia and Nahla as unfamiliar plants erupt in their city, the film blends documentary and fiction to explore urban transformation and human-nature relations.