Frieze Film 2023

A group of teenagers traverse a utopian city, their journey nuanced with poetic texts and motifs borrowed from 19th-century Sicilian fairy tales

A complex surreal tapestry that blurs the boundaries between science fiction, archaeology and youthful spontaneity

With nods to noir and German Expresionism, Strafer’s film is an intriguingly wonky piece of meta-cinema

A film that champions the shipworm, a tiny marine creature that ate away at the vessels involved in the Atlantic slave trade

Notions of authenticity and performance are questioned in a distortion of the conventional frameworks of narrative cinema

An anthropological narrative of migration seen through a landscape that was frozen during the last ice age but is now jungly and equatorial

Referencing an iconic moment of frivolity in a time of revolution from art history, Kukama reinterprets a playful act into a critique of the power dynamics at play in contemporary Johannesburg

A deeply personal retrospection on the influence of US foreign policy on the decades-long civil war in Angola  

This year’s wide-ranging programme, showing at the ICA and online, ‘offers a thoughtful exploration of contemporary realities, encouraging viewers to engage critically with the world around them’

The vibrant and conflicted world of Blackpool: from nostalgic affection for the British seaside to the harrowing toll of the AIDS years on its gay scene

The deconstruction of cross-generational stories interrogates the foundation of belief systems

An imagined future where you can inject other people’s memories into your own life.

A film that explores the geological timeframe of digital devices past their intended shelf life.

The sensory dimension of memory and its potential to bridge individual and collective experiences.

The search for a physical manuscript raises questions of the ownership of identities.

A film about remembering another film, often incorrectly.

The ecosystems of fungi examine abstract spaces and non-linear time.

Physical beings that exist in the real world are reduced to data and trace new digital identities.