Filmmaker Zia Anger and movement artist Monica Mirabile present a performative conversation, working through their collaborative practice and a hypothetical future work.
Broadcast on Thursday 16 September, 7pm
Made between three locations, artist and filmmaker Sharlene Bamboat’s latest work is assembled through a call and response exchange of sound, text and image. Interested in the framework of voice, vibration, time, sound and language that quantum physics explores, Bamboat’s new film emerges from an exchange of theoretical entanglements but is practiced and rendered through bodily ones.
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“The question always has been whether these stories of Hawai‘i have any worth to anyone in Gwangju, or vice versa. Furthermore, should the worth be the end of all stories? Why should one care, and how does one really care about the trouble beyond a national border, let alone the border of one’s skin? Here, does film educate about this method to care; or is it regenerating and readjusting the area of one’s skin?” —Sung Hwan Kim
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When we are amongst our own our labels disappear. We become more than we usually are. We can finally get closer to ourselves, shedding a layer of unwanted eyes. This moment of real home amongst family is presented in a virtual tour around the 3D rendered city “FAM”. The city fam has been made as a tribute to the work of 3 artists: Shenece Oretha, Ebun Sodipo and Day Eve.
Like this space their works have held more than can be spoken, and have given rise for spaces like this to be conceived. Tread respectfully. —Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
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The Void Project looks at the effect of the absence of Palestinian visual archives on the construction of a Palestinian visual narrative. The project was founded by Palestinian documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, producer and writer Azza El-Hassan, whose documentary films mostly reflect her experience living in exile and her experience living in Palestine. In this programme, El-Hassan brings together a selection of films produced by the Palestine Film Institute in Jordan and Lebanon during the revolutionary years of Palestinian Cinema. These films are a testimony to both the history of international solidarity with Palestine, as well as the ongoing struggle for a self determined Palestinian narrative. — Jemma Desai
The screening at the Maltings will be introduced by Sheyma Buali, a programmer, producer and writer and member of the London Palestine Film Festival programming team since 2011.
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Watch One Way or Another (1977) Sara Gómez’s “bold work of revolutionary feminism” alongside Back Inside Herself (1984) by S. Pearl Sharp. Back Inside Herself is newly restored by Cinenova and will be accompanied by On the Inside a prose poem by London-based poet Sarah Lasoye.
The screening is a prelude to Cinenova’s The Work We Share – a programme of 10 newly digitised films from the Cinenova collection. All have been captioned by Collective Text and are accompanied by 10 new artist response commissions, which will tour the UK throughout 2021-22.
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Made by pioneering Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez, One Way or Another is a bold work of revolutionary feminism and a compelling and complex picture of Cuban life under socialism. Radical in its honest and unflinching assessment of the difficulties of living in a newly formed socialist society, it astutely shows the struggles of marginalised communities adapting to revolutionary ideals, whilst casting a critical lens on the machismo, class and race discrimination that was still present in Castro’s post-revolutionary Cuba.
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Back Inside Ourselves is a workshop that features three recent works by filmmakers Tako Taal (DUMP_outthroughthemouth), Rhiana Bonterre (Rhythms of my Silence) and Ufuoma Essi (Bodies in Dissent). Their works are brought into dialogue with S. Pearl Sharpe’s Back Inside Herself (newly digitised by Cinenova and playing in BFMAF 2021’s Essential Cinema strand).
The Screenings will be accompanied by a response from London-based poet Sarah Lasoye commissioned by Cinenova and followed by an open participatory discussion with the filmmakers.
Artist, writer and researcher Jamila Prowse has been invited to write a reflective text on the workshop that will be published after.
There are only 12 places available at the workshop so please only book a space if you are definitely able to attend. Book your free space here.
Participants will be asked to wear masks throughout the event and adhere to 1m social distancing.
Supported by Berwick Visual Arts
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Described by S. Pearl Sharp as “a visual poem on identity”, Back Inside Herself shows a Black woman finding her own sense of self and rejecting hegemonic societal expectations of who she should be and how she should behave.
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After an election that has shaken its already precarious political and economic stability, DR Congo is trying to revive its project to build Africa’s largest power plant on the Congo River. Kinshasa, the capital, remains in darkness while its population struggles for access to light. Rising Up at Night subtly portrays a population that is reinventing itself in spite of everything, in an environment plagued by the violence and beauty of Kinshasa’s nights and the uncertainty of the next day.
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An essay film in the form of a letter exchange, Nguyễn’s personal and poetic film explores the complex legacy of cultural and historical occupation, its ongoing presence in the indigenous Cham community, and her role as an artist.
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As the journey starts, wide empty landscapes make one wonder what one is looking for. A mysterious object? A crime scene? Something horrifying? The scenes are getting more and more specific, but they do not lead to any concrete solution—only an injury in place of a metaphor. —Nguyễn Trinh Thi
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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.
Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Focus Programmes are supported by CREAM, University of Westminster and Centre for Screen Cultures at the University of St Andrew
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Resisting the westernised reliance on images for creating narratives, telling stories and experiencing the world, How to Improve the World turns to music and sound as a way of perceiving through listening. Originally a 3-channel installation, this aurally centred work reflects on the past, present and future of indigenous cultures of the people in Vietnam’s Central Highlands.
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Fifth Cinema begins with a quiet statement “I am a filmmaker, as you know.” That text and what follows, by Maori filmmaker Barry Barclay, who coined the term ‘Fourth Cinema’ to distinguish Indigenous cinema from the established ‘First, Second, and Third Cinema’ framework, provides structure to Nguyễn’s hybrid essay film that moves on multiple cinematic and topical terrains. Eschewing voice in favour of the written word and juxtaposing moving images of the filmmaker’s own daughter with archival images of Vietnamese women seen through the lens of the “ship’s officers”, the film slowly leads the viewer through a narrative of colonialism, indigeneity and cinematic limitations in representation. —Nguyễn Trinh Thi
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A performance film consisting of a string of five slow motion portraits of a young woman—recalling the stillness of photographs. Each portrait varies in length and gesture as her myriad expressions invite our gaze.
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A reaction to the groundbreaking text by Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz entitled “Exorcism and the Art of Healing in Ceylon,” this silent and hand processed film considers a history of colonialism and ethnographic practices in South Asia. At his mother’s village, Samarasinghe restaged an exorcism once performed on her in the early 1960s when she was a little girl. Possessed by the lecherous entity known as the Kalu Kumara, the Sanni Yakuma healing ritual was performed over a 12-hour period.
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A paean to Kenneth Anger, this film is depicts a short procession of colourful material and a mysterious woman lit by the sun.
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Two people mourn an unsaid tragedy in this silent and improvised play in cinematic narrativity and melodrama, telling an elegiac tale in portraiture. In looking at narrative cinematic storytelling, this piece also examines the devices of power and control embedded into that form and tradition.
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Shot improvisationally in 2010, shortly after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, this film takes a lyrical approach to examining recent history and the process of reconstruction in the post-war era. The visions of an exile are carried through an immoral silence, to an end both dubious and bittersweet.
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At the centre of this film is a Sri Lankan woman accessing other places in digital form, while situated in her own physical reality. Navigating through a multitude of spaces from the natural world to man-made environments as well as virtual planes, traditional relationships between the creator, the tool, and the subject are questioned, shattered and reconstructed.
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This associative stream of visuals, culled from the past, reflect on the roles of art, labor and journalism in contemporary Sri Lanka, facing a dubious future ahead. Memory and ethnographic deconstruction cascade in an obliterated form, forging a dire and prescient assemblage.
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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.
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A silent poem reflecting on the place of the filmmaker’s mother’s birth and her first traces on earth. A generational portrait of South Asian “makers” becomes a perceptual voyage into memory, experience and touch.
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The condition of distance, genetic to the ethnographic image, traces the elusive qualities of Samarasinghe’s mother’s past and persona as a woman of partial Chinese heritage.
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Everyday states of being and decay are observed through the infinite scope of the cosmos and the restorative light which emanates from it, driving cinematic and photographic impulses.
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Informed by principles of psychogeography and human ecology, this non-verbal film suggests a mournful narrative involving humans and the nocturnal and crepuscular landscapes they inhabit.
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Hailstorm is based in the Narmada valley in central India, an area with extremely low levels of groundwater. Farmers here battle for survival, pitched against the vagaries of climate change. Following the events of a freak hailstorm over four seasons, the film unfolds the vulnerability and precarity of those that are at the sharpest end of global capitalism’s rapacious greed and the furthest from its benefits. —Jemma Desai
In a village in central India, dedicated school teachers put their heart and soul into preparing a group of children for an entrance exam for a Government-run “School of Excellence.” Entrance Exam explores the stakes of the opportunities afforded by this continued, subsidised education for underprivileged children, as well as the many layers of struggle in this intense and surprising journey.
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Turn Left, Turn Right is a narrative feature following Kanitha (played by artist/filmmaker Kanitha Tith), a free-spirited young woman in Phnom Penh who doesn’t conform to society’s (and her mother’s) expectations. Easily prone to daydreams, Kanitha floats by working at a rock club and at a hotel, riding her motorbike across the city and generally being restless, unsettled and at times self-sabotaging. But this lifestyle is increasingly out of step not only with her mother’s demands, but also with her father’s deteriorating health. When she needs to step in and care for him, engaging with dreams might provide a potential solution to his suffering.
Through an expertly pitched blend of realistic fiction, Sunrise in My Mind shows a view of a beauty salon in Phnom Penh at night which sparkles like a jewel box. The patterned aquamarine wallpaper plays off of the many pink objects inside, including the shirt of the film’s protagonist Pich, a beautician whose mind is clearly elsewhere. Against the strains of a soul song from the early 1970s by Pan Ron, the co-workers’ conversation moves toward the guy who has a crush on Pich, to which she acts demure and with indifference (but also with a private smile to herself). But Lay, a deliveryman who rides a motorbike through the city at night, reliably shows up to the salon. After asking Pich to wash his hair, we witness a moment of intimacy, though it’s unclear whether this is real or imagined.
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Last Night I Saw You Smiling finds filmmaker Kavich Neang documenting the final days of the White Building. An architectural landmark in Phnom Penh built in the 1960s, the building was earmarked for destruction in 2017. Originally built as social housing for moderate income tenants, the White Building stood as witness to the history of the past 50 years in Cambodia. After the building (and city) became empty due to the Khmer Rouge’s brutal regime in the 1970s, tenants relocated to a building that came into increasing disrepair while simultaneously nurturing a community of artists, educators and neighbours. Neang films residents packing up their lives in the final week before moving out, conversing about their own personal histories and how they intertwine with the White Building and Cambodia at large.
Golden Slumbers is a feature documentary on the legacy and contemporary traces of the “golden age” of Cambodian cinema which emerged from the 1960s and into the 1970s. During this period, several hundred feature films were produced and exhibited in cinemas across the country, and even in some cases internationally. But the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror from 1975 to 1979—which resulted in the deaths of over 3 million Cambodians—also put a halt to this flourishing national cinema. Director Davy Chou reckons with this loss of life and culture through finding remnants of this cinematic past among rogue photos, still-existing soundtrack music, traces of film studios in the land and most of all in the memories of the few who survived, among them actors, directors and cinema-lovers.
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Cambodia 2099 is a fictional short by Davy Chou which, on the face of it, consists of three characters whose interactions drive the film’s action. Sotha (artist Sotha Kun) and Kavich (Anti-Archive filmmaker Kavich Neang) meet on a sunny day in Phnom Penh’s Diamond Island to discuss their dreams from the night before. Kavich’s girlfriend Vanary (first-time actress Sothea Vann) comes to meet him and they spend the evening together in which a difficult conversation needs to be had. The film’s climax comes as Sotha re-enacts his dream, transporting to the future out of thin air in front of a crowd assembled on motorbikes.
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Sreylin Meas’ first film follows a simple scenario in creating a stunning work of loneliness and connection shot at an oceanfront resort. Sarita travels to the seaside to take a break from her hectic life and family obligations. While exploring the surrounding wilderness, she meets another woman, Sak, who works at the hotel where she is staying. Also in need of respite from her busy job, Sak invites Sarita to meet in a secret place where the two discover an unforeseen connection that allows them to temporarily escape from reality.
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Kanitha Tith’s 2014 artist film Boding is an evocative portrait of Phnom Penh’s White Building, Cambodia’s first public housing project built for moderate-income residents during the early 1960s. Originally consisting of 468 apartments, the White Building (like the whole city that surrounds it) was abandoned during the Khmer Rouge regime rule in the 1970s. After their fall in 1979, the building fell into disrepair but was still a home for its original residents, artists, community educators and others who built a vibrant community there. Tith’s film is a patient walkthrough of the “boding” (as it is popularly called by locals) that allows the viewer an unhurried look at its corridors, surfaces and the manifestations of life inside and around it.
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This collection of short form work by the Cambodian filmmakers associated with the production company Anti-Archive shows the breadth and quality of their filmmaking.
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Kavich Neang’s first film is a short documentary following Sory Chan, a 14-year-old boy who is living in Phnom Penh apart from his family. A student of Cambodian classical music, Sory lives with his mother’s friend after his mother fled a debt she couldn’t afford to pay back. Each evening after class, he carries a scale outside in a popular part of the city and asks people to weigh themselves for a small amount of money. In this urgent film, we witness Sory’s day in class, his nightly routine and a particularly difficult conversation with his mother who he meets on the street.
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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. The film that the Berwick Young Filmmakers have produced together, explores the theme ‘Reworld’—speculating on what life in the year 2031 could be like and imagining how people, technology and nature may change in the near future.
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When Amongst Our Own is an online work and exhibition designed by Danielle Braithwaite Shirley produced and commissioned by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Circuit NZ, New Zealand and Spike Island, Bristol. It includes a sound work by Shenece Oretha, a publication by Ebun Sodipo and a film by Day Eve.
Available online from Monday 13th September
SEEMAWORLD is an immersive, multi-channel realm and streaming facility. It’s comprised of the mimicry of multiple amenities and services—which act as portals to a specific aspect of SEEMAWORLD. An interactive installation, it shows born-digital artefacts alongside digitised works of traditional media.
As a colony of SEEMAWORLD, BERWICKWORLD transports viewers firmly into the cinematics of the cinema and magnifies Fan Labour as behaviour, thought and form. —Seema Mattu
Available online from Monday 13th September
These are notes on planning and programming the Festival this year, open for comment on a google doc.
Fragments from documents that guided our planning and programming process are opened out for comment to accredited guests between 15-22 September after which we will host a discussion between Festival Director Peter Taylor, Head of Programming Jemma Desai and writer and programmer Abby Sun reflecting on the collective writing process.
Accredited guests will be able to access the document here from the 15 September, the public event on will take place on the 24 September and will be open to all ticket and pass holders.
Back Inside Ourselves is an online exhibition inspired by S. Pearl Sharp’s Back Inside Herself which plays in our Essential Cinema Strand.
Featuring three recent works by filmmakers Ufuoma Essi, Tako Taal, and Rhiana Bonterre.
We recommend you find a quiet space, some headphones, and clear some time to explore the different elements of this work. The presentation plays on a loop opening out the possibility of durational repetitions, witnessing and revelation.
Available online from Friday 17 September coinciding with a 24 hour screening of S Pearl Sharp’s Back Inside Herself & an in conversation between the director and poet Sarah Lasoye.
Supported by Berwick Visual Arts.
