Breaking the Fifth Wall

Part I

Part I explicitly deals with the fallout from sharing our lives with our digital selves — a heightened level of self-consciousness. This manifests as a compulsion towards reflexivity and an obsession with our own physicality.

The BF Artist Film Festival is a critical platform for artists working with moving image, offering screening opportunities to early and mid-career artists nationally and internationally. The festival curates programmes of short films, narrative work, documentaries, essay pieces, animation and collage, bringing experimental moving image into shared public spaces. Beyond screenings, it functions as a meeting point for audiences, curators and peers, supporting a community conversation around contemporary film and video practices in the arts.

Curated programming is central to the festival's identity, with each edition built around a theme that frames the selected works as a coherent body of viewing. Guest curators are invited to draw on the festival archive and assemble programmes that reveal connections between works and ideas. This approach allows films that have previously been shown to be reconsidered in a new thematic context, extending the life of moving image work and creating fresh readings for audiences unfamiliar with it.

Collaboration with other festivals and cultural events widens the festival's reach, allowing curated programmes to travel to venues and cities beyond its home base. Such partnerships introduce the archive to new audiences and expose artists to wider recognition, while giving partner events distinctive film strands shaped by careful curation. The format rewards both established names and emerging practitioners, since the emphasis falls on the work and the theme rather than on star billing.

The festival's broader mission includes supporting artists at key moments in their careers, with opportunities for screening, discussion, collaboration and exchange with peers in the field. Projects are developed alongside curators, collaborators and venues, and accompanying talks, workshops and other events help audiences engage with the ideas behind each film. This structure sustains an ongoing culture around artist film, where emerging talent is given a platform and the wider public is invited into the conversation.

Part II

Part II considers films about making films, alongside the physical presence of the body within the frame, and works for which the Internet functions as subject matter in its own right.