Secondary School Screening and Curator’s Talk Thursday 20 September 2018, 10:00 (Years 10 +)
Secondary Schools are invited to bring students to watch a dedicated screening of Jîn, introduced by Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn. An existential thriller with touches of magic realism, the film follows 17-year-old Jîn, a Red Riding Hood with a fierce survival instinct.
To bring your group, please contact val@bfmaf.org. Optional visit to installation trail.
Run Time
Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of more controlling powers.
A taut thriller, the film reveals a political fantasy, an alternative reality whose characters teeter on the dull knife edge that is contemporary American politics, at the same time refusing to fall right of left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish.
“Filled with energy, rage, and the smallest measure of hope, Empty Metal is a new kind of political film for these extraordinary times.” —Film Society of Lincoln Center
Q&A with filmmakers Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer
Run Time
Set in 1987, soon after the People Power Revolution which led to the fall of president Marcos, Nervous Translation follows eight-year-old Yael. A shy and uneasy girl, she listens endlessly to the cassette tapes recorded by her father, who has spent years away from home working in Saudi Arabia. When she hears an advertisement for a pen that will give her a ‘wonderful life’, she decides to spend all her savings on this miracle pen.
Yael’s world is small and tender—she likes to play cooking on her mini stove—but the real world comes knocking: a typhoon approaches the Philippines. Giving a voice to this quiet girl in a perceptive, playful film full of jump cuts, sensitive sound design, ’80s music and even an odd surrealist intermezzo, Seno empathetically captures the innocence and uncertainty of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world, although she is surrounded by it.
Introduction by filmmaker Shireen Seno
UK premiere of Nervous Translation presented jointly by BFMAF and Tate Modern
The film will be preceded by the 2018 Berwick New Cinema award presentation
Run Time
Join the young people and their friends in the exhibition for a Discovery Party and refreshments. All welcome.
Run Time
An analogue foray into a digital world.
Working with Newcastle-based moving image collective Film Bee, 15 young people from Berwick Youth Project have used collective reflection and DIY problem solving to create a series of provocations and installations about reality in a digitalised world, and how the value of images has changed with shifts in technology, particularly social media.
Berwick Youth Project provides youth clubs and bespoke activities to engage and support young people aged 13 to 18. The hub of all this activity is located at The Beehive, a purpose built youth facility. The moving image art work was made during a series of evening and summer holiday participatory sessions in collaboration with artists Mat, Christo and Leah from Film Bee.
The young people also took a trip to Tate Modern in London during the summer holidays to meet the ARTIST ROOMS team, see work by artists Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas and Pablo Picasso, helping to inform the work they have produced.
In their own words:
‘It’s really boring to be a teenager in Berwick and this project gave us the opportunity to try something totally different and learn about art in a new and interesting way. Working with the artists was really cool and we hope lots of people young and older will come and see our installation.’
The Hurt Goes On was produced and created as part of ARTIST ROOMS Learning Programme and inspired by the work of artist Douglas Gordon, presented by Berwick Visual Arts at the Gymnasium Gallery in summer 2018
The ARTIST ROOMS programme is delivered by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate in partnership with Ferens Art Gallery until 2019, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, by Art Fund and by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland
Join Katie and Chloë at the Kaleidoscope shop (59 Marygate) for a dedicated Zoetrope-making session. Learn how to make an animation film with no film or or gadgets! Suitable for ages 7 to 13. Places are free but should be booked via The Maltings. Children must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
Run Time
Join Katie and Chloë at the Kaleidoscope shop (59 Marygate) at 15:30 to watch Song of the Sea, an enchanting Irish animation that tells the story of Ben and his little sister Saoirse. Suitable for childrenages 5+ and popcorn provided.Places are free but should be booked via The Maltings.
Run Time
Kaleidoscope is a bean-bag cinema and family friendly art space. There is a rolling programme of animated films from Cinekid Festival Amsterdam. Hands-on making activities will be led by artists Katie Chappell and Chloë Smith.
Run Time
Run Time
An essay in five parts, Evaporating Borders offers a series of vignettes, poetically guided by the filmmaker’s curious eye and personal reflections. Through the people she encounters along the way, the film dissects the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus : A PLO activist and exile from Iraq is denied asylum within 15 minutes; neo-nazi fundamentalists roam the streets in an attack on Muslim migrants; activists and academics organize an antifascist rally and clash with the neo-nazis; 195 migrants drown in the Mediterranean.
Run Time
Run Time
A dive, the midday sunlight filtering down through the water. The air in
her lungs has to last until she can dislodge the abalone. Dives like
these have been carried out in Japan for over 2000 years by the Ama-San, that literally translates “women of the sea”.
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Accompanying the Festival’s exhibitions programme, the Berwick New Cinema Competition features resolutely contemporary films that transgress restraints of genre, capital and expectation. Doubling in size since its first iteration in 2016, it is one of the Festival’s ambitions to develop dialogue around different presentation potentials for the moving image.
A drive towards liveness and agency provides a critical framework for selections.
This year’s jury are 2016 Berwick New Cinema Award winner Camilo Restrepo, artist and curator Amal Khalaf (Serpentine Gallery and GCC Collective) and film programmer Joanna Raczynska (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Run Time
Run Time
Bodies as markers and makers of change. Desirable and desiring, abject, vulnerable, undignified, flawed and fragile, caught between the mundane and the mythological, the domestic and the supernatural. What shines through are the social, political and emotional ramifications of corporeal transgression.
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
A speedway film night, including the world premiere screening of Mm, a BFMAF and Northern Film & Media commission commission by Margaret Salmon. Shot with the Berwick Bandits, Berwick-upon-Tweed’s own speedway heroes, Mm commemorates their 50th season and offers an imaginative take on the thrilling wold of this popular motorcycle sport.
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Run Time
Take the Credits! works from the idea that the final moments of a film — where, conventionally, a point of resolution has been reached, music plays and the credits roll — could become a climactic centre piece to a period of experimentation and collaborative making.
We will run short, drop-in workshops producing texts/scripts, images, objects/props and video that will gradually fill the venue with an installation.
Run Time
Run Time
Now in its 10th year, the Young Filmmakers’ Competition is BFMAF’s annual award to help support and encourage budding young filmmakers. Featuring a variety of genres, from animation to documentary to narrative film, the competition showcases some of the best young talent from the region.
The competition is supported by Chrissie Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson (director of Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator), in commemoration of the life of Chris Anderson, a resident of Berwick who was an active supporter young filmmakers and of the Festival.