Black Burns Fast
Sandulela Asanda | South Africa | 2025 | English & isiXhosa with English subtitles | CC | 96m
Scottish Premiere
Seventeen-year-old Luthando, adorkable, bookish, and forever drifting between reality and her vivid inner world, returns for another year at a prestigious South African all-girls’ boarding school. Behind its manicured lawns and bright, busy corridors, the school hides a deceptively conservative culture where reputation is everything, and nonconformity is quietly disciplined. As the lone scholarship girl, Luthando has learned to keep her head down, her marks up, and her mother’s strict expectations close to heart.
Her world tilts when Ayanda, a bold and effortlessly magnetic new student, arrives. Their connection sparks into something that Luthando has only ever daydreamed about. As they begin a secret romance, Luthando is ushered into Ayanda’s orbit of confident, carefree friends, tasting freedom she’s never experienced within the school’s rigid walls.
The feature will be screened alongside short film:
ChikaBOOM!
C. Craig Patterson | US | 2026 | English | CC | 9m
UK Premiere
Chika Batstone is an aspiring young magician whose curiosity accidentally unleashes Kaboom, a chaotic magical creature, into the heart of New York City. With her world-famous magician father, The Amazin’ Arnie, performing nearby, Chika must contain the mayhem before it’s too late. Featuring the voice cast of Yara Shahidi, Daveed Diggs, Natasha Lyonne, Roy Wood Jr and Tika Sumpter.
This screening includes an introduction from queer feminist writer, activist, healer, life coach and award-winning documentary and feature film producer Rosie Motene.
The screening will be followed by a free zine making workshop facilitated by Martha Adonai Williams.
Before group chats and DMs, there were folded notes. Passed across classrooms, slipped into pockets, scribbled in margins. Tiny paper vessels carrying crushes, secrets, questions, confessions...
A zine isn't so different. A single sheet of paper, folded into a story, a memory, a secret.
Taking the intimate gesture and materiality of 'the note' as our starting point, we'll use collage, writing and drawing to make new zines inspired by first love, hidden feelings, friendship, longing, and the people who helped us become ourselves. Whether you're reflecting on your own coming-of-age or coming out story, imagining one, or celebrating the friendships that have shaped you, you'll leave with a folded message to keep or pass on to a friend, a lover or maybe even a crush.
Tickets to workshop must be booked separately here.
Presented in partnership with Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF).
Accessibility
This event will have:
English-BSL interpretation
Live Captioning
Descriptive subtitles
Rosie Motene
Rosie Motene is a Pan-African queer feminist writer, activist, healer, life coach and award-winning documentary and feature film producer, with over 30 years of experience in television, film and broadcasting, alongside 20 years of human rights advocacy. Her work centres gender justice and LGBTQIA+ rights through a trauma-informed, intersectional feminist lens.
She has curated and facilitated work across Africa and internationally, using storytelling, feminist political education and creative practice as tools for healing, resistance and social transformation. She is a producer of the award-winning documentary The Woman Who Poked The Leopard (2025), about Ugandan feminist activist and scholar Dr Stella Nyanzi.
Her award-winning autobiography, Reclaiming The Soil, explores her experience of being raised by her mother’s employers, a white Jewish family, during apartheid South Africa. The book reflects on interracial and interfaith adoption, African identity, belonging and racism, and the complex ways in which personal history intersects with systems of power.
Martha Adonai Williams
Martha Adonai Williams is a writer, facilitator and creative producer whose practice centres Black feminist world-making, collective care and the transformative possibilities of storytelling.