Siren Test

The Fugs, dubbed the “Rolling Stones of the underground”, were a New York band from the first wave of the 1960s counterculture and underground scene. In the work of Ed Sanders and his bandmates, profound poetry collides with contempt for social conventions and an urge to break taboos. The Fugs were the living embodiment of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – so much so that an FBI file described them as “the filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly imagine”. Director Chuck Smith crafts their portrait as more than an explosively dynamic, layered chapter in pop culture: the film is also a pointed commentary on today’s autocracy and the possibilities of cultural resistance, civil disobedience and performative poetry that torpedoes the system.

As we move through a place of war and humanitarian catastrophe, can we attend to subtler sensory experiences such as listening? Sound recordist Mohamed Yaghi tirelessly records the sounds of the Gaza Strip, guiding us through four stories of people and sound. Each person reflects the impact of the war that began on 7 October. Through their voices and experiences, we witness how the sounds of this devastated region have changed. The film offers an original perspective on how humanity endures horror, and on a distinctive mode of survival: by holding fast to reality, to the ambiguity and power of sound.

Sun Ra, a unique visionary of musical Afrofuturism, continues to inspire contemporary filmmakers long after his death. This film explores his youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Ra himself claimed to have come from Saturn, yet it was in Birmingham that he laid the foundations of his mystical thought and music, seeing in his city an extraordinary world full of signs. The Magic City is as much a portrait of an eccentric young artist as of the racially segregated urban cosmos itself – a world at once political and magical, mundane and fantastical, unsettling and fascinating.