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.
Our Awards programme is central to the Festival and represents some of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary filmmakers working today.
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.
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.
Join us for a celebration of young filmmaking talent from across North East England and South East Scotland.
In suspiration!, Taylor brings false promises made by the United Kingdom to the surface with pieces of news footage and a spoken testimony describing racism in the UK. Amongst this bleakness, moments of beauty shine through, indicating the possibility for reassurance and hope.
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.
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
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
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.
Language folds and falls in on itself in this new video work by artist duo Cat and Éiméar McClay. Animated 3D tableaus of Catholic paraphernalia and strikes of elemental weather accompany the words. Together, they enact the historically fraught relationship between queerness and the Catholic church.
Alternative Economies was made in conversation with herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad and financial services regulator Rachel Bardiger. The film discusses the imperialist exploits of the Disney character Scrooge McDuck, and the apparently radical yet deeply compromised promises of cryptocurrency. Between these two strands, possibilities for an alternative network of exchange and subsistence are sought.