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.
Ahead of its 18th edition, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has created four new job roles which will help shape the Festival. For further details on each role or to make an application, please visit our Opportunities page.
Explore our past festival programmes, dating back to 2009.→
10 September – 12 September, 2021
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
