The Film Library
The Burr of Berwick Film Library is a community video archive and exhibition series. Open and evolving, the Burr Film Library offers a shared space for screenings, discussions, and creativity.
Based at 22 Bridge Street, the Film Library is open Saturdays 12 – 4pm. The Library also travels to present pop-up events at spaces and occasions around town.
With the potential to speak to personal memories and experiences, the films reflect and respond to real-world topics. Everyone is invited to pop in for a cuppa and share ideas and stories, or delve into the Library’s themes through events and workshops.
Queer Care Caravan is a new arts and health engagement project for The Burr of Berwick. Using our film library as a starting point, the project will explore how care and knowledge are shared—past and present—to support LGBTQIA+ people’s rights and wellbeing.
This workshop is part of the Film Library Exhibition Queer Care Caravan, an artist residency hosted by The Burr of Berwick, exploring resilient LGBTQIA+ community led care.
Queer helplines, archives, and sound imagine futures of community care
Archivists Conal McStravick and Louise Neilson share cross-border histories of lesbian and gay support networks, drawing from switchboards, groups, and media collections. Together we explore how connections formed beyond visibility, and how listening to earlier practices can inspire new approaches to mutual support today within cultural, rural, and international contexts.
Lothian Health Services Archive contributors introduce materials tracing helplines and peer-led infrastructures that linked cities with smaller places during the 1970s and 1980s. Questions emerge around finding each other without visibility, and what those models offer now. Participants encounter ephemera, recordings, and a Stuart Marshall 1970s sound artwork repurposed as a speculative answering machine for future queer and trans health. A curated screening presents Michael Balser’s 1995 experimental television work for Toronto Living with AIDS, featuring voices from artists and activists connected to Diseased Pariah News.
Food, shared fruits, and everyday care objects become tools for collective listening, sonic play, and imagining tomorrow across borders, generations, practices, solidarities, memories, pleasures, and responsibilities together, shaping responsive ethics for community wellbeing collectively.
Exploring grief, communitarian care, and imaging what we might palliate.
Led by Toronto/Tkaranto-based artist and community activist Mikiki. Mikiki will explore models of communitarian grief work and the forms of the “holographic will” and “Pepper’s ghost” to image what we might palliate. The workshop exercise will focus on somatics, parasympathetic nervous system reset, and self-soothing strategies.
The session explores communitarian grief work and care as maintenance, relating to Mikiki’s practice of death cleaning as part of life. Frameworks include the Swedish death cleaning process. The workshop will use the “holograph will/death box” concept to explore imaging what we might palliate. The final workshop, March 27-29, will be the closing event of the BFMAF Festival , which will include a culmination screening