Maria Saakyan
Maria Saakyan (1980, Yerevan, Armenia) was born and grew up in Armenia. In 1992, she moved to Russia with her parents and graduated from Moscow’s VGIK film school in 2003. During her studies she shot several short animated and experimental films. From 2003 to 2006 Maria worked as a creative producer for the Andreevsky Flag Production Company, and in 2009—alongside Victoria Lupik—she founded Anniko Films, where she developed her second feature I’m Going To Change My Name, an independent international co-production which was awarded Best Pitch from B2B, Belgrade and DAB at Golden Apricot International Film Festival, Yerevan. In 2010, Saakyan was selected for Berlinale Talent Campus. Her films have screen world-wide at IFFR, International Film Festival Telluride (USA); Premiers Planes (France), Film Festival Oberhausen (Germany), Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Sofia International Film Festival, among others. Her directorial debut The Lighthouse has been awarded Special mention at Premiera Film Festival (Moscow), Best Debut at ̈Golden Apricot (Armenia), Grand-Prix at Split International Film Festival and First Prize at Moscow Human Rights Festival.
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Our Awards programme is central to the Festival and represents some of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary filmmakers working today.
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Seamus Harahan presents Fucking Finland, an anthology of film freshly completed for his Festival commission.
With a hand-held video camera and armed with a painter’s eye and a musician’s ear, Harahan’s journey begins in Suomenlinna, an inhabited Finnish sea fortress with obvious parallels to Berwick, and traces a line across to Tallinn, Estonia and then on to Rostock, Germany.
With a hand-held video camera and armed with a painter’s eye and a musician’s ear, Harahan’s journey begins in Suomenlinna, an inhabited Finnish sea fortress with obvious parallels to Berwick, and traces a line across to Tallinn, Estonia and then on to Rostock, Germany.
The ferry connecting Hanko and Rostock becomes a melancholic pop metaphor for the old Iron Curtain era, creating audacious – maybe even insolent – links between places that were enveloped in two different and opposing ideological blocks not that long ago.
The Fucking Finland Series is supported by the Elephant Trust.
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Once in the XX Century is a gallery-based exploration of the oeuvre of Lithuanian filmmaker Deimantas Narkevičius. The works included in the exhibition are:
Celebrating our region’s young filmmakers, BFMAF presents shorts in competition for a cash prize and two prestigious awards: The Young Filmmakers Award and The Chris Anderson Award.
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Berwick New Cinema presents innovative and internationally acclaimed films that push their
genre to the very limits – the point where boundaries between art and cinema remain fluid. The programme includes feature length, midlength and short films. Many of these are premieres, but retrospective and archival titles have also been carefully selected to provide invigorating historical precedents to the programme.
Exploring our theme of Fact or Fiction through discussion, reflection and contextualisation of the featured
films, Ed Webb-Ingall will lead the Berwick New Cinema Seminar programme featuring directors present at the Festival, including presentations from Salomé Lamas, Tim Leyendekker and Festival Artist in Focus Deimantas Narkevičius.
Co-hosted with Berwick Visual Arts, accompanying Artist One- to-One Sessions with Paul Rooney and Rehana Zaman will also be available to seminar participants. A number of these will be offered via Northumberland Arts Development bursaries to allow Northumberland- based moving image artists to attend the Festival.
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On the same day as the Scottish independence referendum, Short Stories from the Border features tales drawing on the divide between England and Scotland and on crossing borders all over the world.
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From hundreds of entries responding to our Border Crossing theme, we bring you some of the best short films and artists’ videos from across the world as part of the 2nd Inntravel Short Film Award.
