One of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest contributions to the photographic image were stereographs commissioned by the U.S. Army, capturing their war against the Modoc Tribe in Northern California. These stereographs, many of which were staged, are revisited here through violent collisions of image and sound – generating entangled histories of visual technology, genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations.
‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’. – an astonishing collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos in which people speak to camera about what love is for them.
A project that began in 1977 documenting the experiences of marginalised women and communities in the US, artists Wendy Clarke and Kim Coleman open the work out at BFMAF inviting the creation of new tapes and a multi-perspective portrait of love.
just above the tear duct on each side
A critical look at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the confluence of carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic incentives that determined their influence.
Over 100 filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
The first edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s New Cinema Forum is an invitation to artists, filmmakers, critics and arts/film workers to consider new orientations to creating, exhibiting and working collectively. Offering practical ways to sustain and develop your practice and community, the NCF is a relaxed space to reflect and make connections ahead of our Opening Night film.
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When a supernatural entity plagues a village community in war torn Northern Sri Lanka, a mother loses her son. Set in militarily occupied territory marked by 26 years of civil war, this hybrid docufiction made collaboratively, and secretly, with impacted Tamil communities lyrically examines the stories of missing people. A potent, elliptical protest poem moving with grace and purpose between disparate cinematic forms.
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Unfolding over a single night’s journey into morning, Nightshift (1981) distills the comings and goings of a hotel foyer into an eerie series of moods.
Two participatory art projects from the North East where young people were asked to consider their perception of, and experiences in, local communities in Wooler, Northumberland and Byker, Newcastle. The young artists worked with a filmmaker to explore the rich archives of their local areas, uncovering histories and thinking about their identities in relation to notions of place.
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Telepathy, waterways and ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker connect a programme of new cinema exploring representations of family, intimacy and ancestral memory.
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Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London, a productive dialectic opens between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities.
A programme of filmic rhythm and blues – of love and fainting cheerleaders, and of our capacity for knowing and feeling in a present infused with trauma.
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Curated by artist-filmmaker Gail Pickering, Unsettled Grounds brings together works by graduates of the Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, each engaging with landscapes in states of transformation—whether shaped by environmental change, personal histories, or industrial decline.
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Part one of BFMAF Propositions programme looking at the work of artist, educator and activist Stuart Marshall. Stuart’s work challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, subverting and critiquing the prevailing language of television and news media.
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A programme of new cinema inspired by the hallucinogenic properties of flowers, archival dissonance, and tales of a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.