Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

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A new season and a new approach. After 18 years BFMAF is moving to a new date, 3 – 5th March 2023. Find out more here.

To better understand the reasons behind this date change please read our Festival Statement

 

 

 

21 July 2022

A New Season: Renewing & Rewilding BFMAF

Since 2005, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) has taken place annually each September in England’s most northerly town, bringing visitors to North Northumberland and working year round with artists, filmmakers, local audiences and schools.→
21 July 2022

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is Changing!

After 18 years the annual Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is moving from its regular autumn slot to a new date, 3 – 5th March 2023. The Festival’s date change reflects a positive approach in a time of continued uncertainty.→
21 July 2022

New Appointments

Following our date change announcement, we are delighted to welcome and introduce the new team members who will oversee the 18th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival in 2023. Artists and researchers Dan Guthrie and Ilinca Vanau will bring new perspectives to the fore as this edition’s Programming Fellows.→
17 January 2022

Moana Pasifika Moving Image Commission 2022

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is very excited to support a newly commissioned single-screen moving image work by a Moana Pasifika artist at this year’s Festival in September In Partnership with CIRCUIT and Tautai Pacific Arts Trust, BFMAF will support a Moana Pasifika artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand to create a new single channel…→

Podcasts

Fox Maxy in conversation with Alice Miller
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Camara Taylor in conversation with Myriam Mouflih
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Abdessamad El Montassir in conversation with Myriam Mouflih
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Jordan Lord in conversation with Jemma Desai
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Tim Leyendekker in conversation with Christina Demetriou
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Suneil Sanzgiri in conversation with Jemma Desai
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Salad Hilowle in conversation with Alice Miller
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Rehana Zaman in conversation with Jemma Desai
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Fern Silva in conversation with Herb Shellenberger
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Cat and Éiméar McClay in conversation with Christina Demetriou
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Carlos Maria Romero in conversation with Herb Shellenberger
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Ane Hjort Guttu in conversation with Herb Shellenberger
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Adam Lewis Jacob, Muhammad Idrish and Claude Nouk in conversation with Alice Miller
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Festival Catalogue

View 2021 Festival
Catalogue →

BFMAF Archive

Explore our past festival programmes, dating back to 2009.→

2021
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Still from Landscape Series #1. The background consists of tightly packed trees with green leaves, greenery, and bushes with varying shades of green shrubbery. On the left, a person dressed in white and wearing a white bucket hat is pointing towards the trees.
Landscape Series #1
Untitled
Film still from How To Improve The World. Wideshot of a wide dirt path with houses and wooden fences on either side, and trees in the background. There's Vietnamese people on the path and the fences.
How to Improve the World
Still from Hair Is A Piece of Body. The background is made up of forestry and outlines of hills. The subject is a white person wearing a white cardigan and pink skirt, although the rest of their outfit and body is cut off at the hip. Their side profile is facing the camera, and their dark hair is being swept by wind, blowing upwards. It appears they are standing on a hill or the edge of one.
Hair is a Piece of Head
Wideshot still from Letters from Panduranga. Close up shot of the shoulders and face of an elderly Vietnamese person. They're wearing glasses, a scarf-like headpiece, and long red, threaded earrings. The background is a small village.
Letters from Panduranga
Wideshot film still from Entrance Exam. On the right hand side, two young boys sitting side by side, one of them writing something on a notepad, and the other peering over the boy's shoulder to read what he's writing. On the left, in the distance. a young boy sitting on a high metal fence with a book in his hands..
Entrance Exam
2020
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Afternoon Clouds
At the River
At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other
Badnam Basti
2019
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[INSERT TITLE HERE]: A Surrealist Gaming Experience
A Hundred Faces for a Single Day
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery
A Town Called Panic
Animistic Apparatus 1: Ecologies and Art in Southeast Asia
2018
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Lips of Blood
What the Sun Has Seen
Seminar: Lucy Clout
Some Interviews on Personal Matters
High School Screening
Seminar: Sophia Al-Maria
2017
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30 KG Shine
Allegro Largo Triste
Battleship Potemkin
Berwick New Cinema: Balearic Abyssal
Berwick New Cinema: Civil Twilight
Berwick New Cinema: Milla
2016
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2002
All the Cities of the North
April and the Extraordinary World
Berwick New Cinema Competition: Blue
Berwick New Cinema Competition: Green
Berwick New Cinema Competition: Red
2015
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Lost High Street
The War Game
Neither A nor not-A
Vampir – Cuadecuc
Opaque
Young Filmmakers Showcase
2014
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A whole New World
Approved for Adoption
Before Night Falls
Démontable
Departure of All
Forbidden Voices

2022 Programming Fellowships

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is inviting applications for the fourth year of its fellowship programme for UK based early career curators, film programmers and critics.→

10 September – 12 September, 2021

Festival 2021

Festival 2021

Welcome to the BFMAF website. Subscribe to our newsletter for upcoming Call for Entries and Job Opportunities news!→

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Anti-Archive

Since its founding in 2014, the Cambodian film production company Anti-Archive has emerged as a formidable platform through which the new generation of filmmakers in Cambodia can develop their artistic visions, realise ambitious productions and collaborate with others internationally.

Still from Sunrise in My Mind. Wideshot of a beauty salon in Cambodia. On the right, a Cambodian women wearing a mask is getting her hair washed in a basin by another Cambodian woman who is standing up. The customer is lying back with her hair in the basin and she's on her phone.

Berwick Young Filmmakers

Intended Ten: The Fate of The Middle Place is a collaborative film made by Berwick Young Filmmakers (a group of local 12–14 year olds). The film was produced over five days of workshops led by artist Kimberley O’Neill, which introduced the group to digital filmmaking and documentary techniques.

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​In10ded Ten: The Fate of The Middle Place

Essential Cinema

Essential Cinema is our pluralist retrospective series that provides a revisionist view of what might be considered canonical works of cinema. The 2021 selection brings new restorations and digitisations that evoke connections between political and spiritual awakenings, taking in projects from India, Cuba, USA and Palestine.

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The Void Project

New Cinema Awards

The Berwick New Cinema Competition becomes the Berwick New Cinema Awards—a non competitive prize that is shared between the filmmakers. The strand encompasses a selection of work that has most spoken to our group of programmers this year and includes what we feel is some of the most distinctive works of new cinema and artists’ moving image being made around the world today.

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Wideshot. On the left, a rectangle photograph with the head of a senior Donald the Duck-esque cartoon wearing small glasses propped on its break. The background of the photo appears to be a golden brown field. This photo appears to be stuck on a glass wall, and the background is blurred with some white and purple objects.
Alternative Economies

Focus

Nguyễn Trinh Thi

Nguyễn Trinh Thi is one of Vietnam’s leading contemporary artists. Her moving image work engages with the ways in which memory, history and representation are part of broader structures of power, the legacies of colonialism and war, and the erasure of indigenous Vietnamese cultures.

Still from Fifth Cinema. The background is black, and in the centre near the bottom, there's small white letters with accents, words that aren't English. They read "'lẵn bộ tộc". Below this is the English translation "a tribal background" in small yellow writing. Above this writing, a young Vietnamese woman at 90 degrees counter clockwise. They're wearing roller skates, a blue and red sweater, and a green jumper tied around their waist.
Fifth Cinema

Online Exhibitions

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s 2021 Online Exhibitions take the place of its usual physical ones in Berwick. Here you’ll find places of radical world building, virtual spaces to gather and to contemplate.

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Back Inside Ourselves

Propositions

Propositions is the Festival’s hybrid of discussion and online screenings, interactive games and performances. The artists in this strand share discoveries encountered through their research, experience and practice.

Still from Hair Is A Piece of Body. The background is made up of forestry and outlines of hills. The subject is a white person wearing a white cardigan and pink skirt, although the rest of their outfit and body is cut off at the hip. Their side profile is facing the camera, and their dark hair is being swept by wind, blowing upwards. It appears they are standing on a hill or the edge of one.
Hair Is A Piece of Body

Focus

Rajee Samarasinghe

Rajee Samarasinghe’s body of work tackles contemporary sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of his own identity and the deconstruction of ethnographic practices. BFMAF 2021 presents a series of Samarasinghe’s 12 short films shot over a decade—an archive of images navigating the terrain of migration, memory, and impermanence.

Still from Show Me Other Places. Shot of a forearm and hand reaching and grabbing someone else's wrist. The person grabbing the other person's wrist is wearing a watch. The background is a beige white.

SPS Community Media

BFMAF is pleased to present two recent films by SPS Community Media which provide a clarifying backdrop to urgent news stories such as the ongoing Farmer’s Protests in India, rooted in the experiences of individuals and families living in Madhya Pradesh, one of the most populous states in India.

Still from Hailstorm. Wide landscape shot of a golden white wheat field, on the left hand side, a young Indian boy, and in the middle, another young Indian boy. They're walking through the field. The background is trees and a dull blue sky.
Hailstorm

Work in Progress

Returning for a second edition, Work in Progress is a Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme strand highlighting forthcoming feature-length films. For 2021’s Work in Progress, we will focus on Congolese director and visual artist Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up at Night (2022) his feature film debut currently in production.

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Rising Up at Night: Work in Progress