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’ ~Wendy Clarke
Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them.
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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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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The final piece of a trilogy exploring the memories and sounds of subterranean spaces, Oda Kaori’s haunting docudrama follows a mysterious figure stalking the borderlands between darkness and light. This poetic study of landscapes finds its anchoring deep in the Okinawan gama caves where stories of life emerge from layers of ancient rock – blooming in the shadows of unspeakable human horror.
Until his final days, Frantz Fanon was deeply shaken by the murder of his friend Patrice Lumumba carried out in coordination between Belgian and CIA agents and their Congolese partners. Lumumba’s assassination is the founding violence of neocolonialism that ushered in a new era that we still live today.
Framed by a screening of Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (2000)
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.
In the mind of an eleven year old girl, a single phone call erases her entire life. Iva Radivojevic’s subtle drama reconstructs fragments of childhood memory to trace currents of loss and trauma that followed her family’s displacement from the former Yugoslavia. With a dreamlike structure and a wistful, unsettling atmosphere, When The Phone Rang unearths dissonant relationships between history and memory.
Departing from a time of coloniality shared by foreign and local powers, where overthrowing a regime is not sufficient to break the shackles that bind.
Framed by a screening of the Victor Jara Collective’s seminal work of political documentary The Terror and the Time (1979) and Moustapha Alassane’s irreverant animated satire Bon Voyage Sim (1966)
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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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Writer and filmmker Philip Rizk is joined by Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and Mai Taha, Assistant Professor in Human Rights at LSE to explore the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Franz Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in.
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Celebrating the work of photographer and filmmaker Marion Scemema through the lens of her close friendship with artist David Wojnarowicz. The screening programme features several of Scemema’s short works, including a newly retrieved and re-edited cut of RELAX BE CRUEL; a seminal document of the Pier 34 warehouse project in New York.
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A double wedding in a small village turns to high drama when one bride runs away and the other refuses to go on with her marriage. Stars in Broad Daylight remains banned from screening in Syria because of its subversive representation and critical voice exposing how the violence of a patriarchal society seeps into the family unit.
Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Saturday night shake down with noodle.