A Love Tapes-themed night of dancing and karaoke to close out BFMAF25 in style! 🥳
Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.
Join us for a special screening of Love Tapes recorded over the Festival. Love Tapes artist Wendy Clarke will also join collaborator Kim Coleman live online to discuss and answer questions from the audience on her Love Tapes project and their collaboration, Endless Love Tapes.
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Departing from the Syrian Revolution, before moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy from 1936 Spain, Angola, and Palestine, to the Paris Commune, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts to dismantle the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.
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Tourism, war, and sunsets – films in this programme capture flows of life, the imprints we leave as we move and the many selves we encounter when we arrive.
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Brooklyn-based artist-writer Ayanna Dozier works across film, performance, and installation using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods.
Her current research and artwork examines how transactional intimacy redistributes care from the private sector into public, social, and political relations.
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A hybrid, participatory movement and performance workshop developed by artist and PhD researcher Conal McStravick and Toronto/Tkaronto-based artist and community activist Mikiki based on the AIDS activist videos of Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Marshall’s videos bookend the propagation of an influential, intersectional mode of AIDS video activism, propagated through UK-Canada transnational video networks.
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A programme of new cinema inspired by the hallucinogenic properties of flowers, archival dissonance, and tales of a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.
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Part one of BFMAF Propositions programme looking at the work of artist, educator and activist Stuart Marshall. Stuart’s work challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, subverting and critiquing the prevailing language of television and news media.
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On the centenary of the founding of the moving image, Sylvia Wynter gave a speech building on V.Y. Mudimbe’s critical observation of the occident’s violent act of “submitt[ing] the world to its memory” through image-making.
Assia Djebar, once Frantz Fanon’s collaborator at the National Liberation Front’s journal El Moudjahid, is a rarely recognised force reclaiming that memory through film.
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Curated by artist-filmmaker Gail Pickering, Unsettled Grounds brings together works by graduates of the Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, each engaging with landscapes in states of transformation—whether shaped by environmental change, personal histories, or industrial decline.
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Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Saturday night shake down with noodle.
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A double wedding in a small village turns to high drama when one bride runs away and the other refuses to go on with her marriage. Stars in Broad Daylight remains banned from screening in Syria because of its subversive representation and critical voice exposing how the violence of a patriarchal society seeps into the family unit.
Celebrating the work of photographer and filmmaker Marion Scemema through the lens of her close friendship with artist David Wojnarowicz. The screening programme features several of Scemema’s short works, including a newly retrieved and re-edited cut of RELAX BE CRUEL; a seminal document of the Pier 34 warehouse project in New York.
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Writer and filmmker Philip Rizk is joined by Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and Mai Taha, Assistant Professor in Human Rights at LSE to explore the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Franz Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in.
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A programme of filmic rhythm and blues – of love and fainting cheerleaders, and of our capacity for knowing and feeling in a present infused with trauma.
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Departing from a time of coloniality shared by foreign and local powers, where overthrowing a regime is not sufficient to break the shackles that bind.
Framed by a screening of the Victor Jara Collective’s seminal work of political documentary The Terror and the Time (1979) and Moustapha Alassane’s irreverant animated satire Bon Voyage Sim (1966)
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In the mind of an eleven year old girl, a single phone call erases her entire life. Iva Radivojevic’s subtle drama reconstructs fragments of childhood memory to trace currents of loss and trauma that followed her family’s displacement from the former Yugoslavia. With a dreamlike structure and a wistful, unsettling atmosphere, When The Phone Rang unearths dissonant relationships between history and memory.
This propositions session features three new works by Morgan Quaintance, bookended by readings from sociologist Laura Harris. Titular film Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London. Seeikokan III and Walking Distance are shorter, ‘miniature’ works produced during the same period of research and production in Tokyo. Filmmaker and translator Chiemi Shimada will lead a Q&A with Quaintance and Harris to conclude the event.
Telepathy, waterways and ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker connect a programme of new cinema exploring representations of family, intimacy and ancestral memory.
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Until his final days, Frantz Fanon was deeply shaken by the murder of his friend Patrice Lumumba carried out in coordination between Belgian and CIA agents and their Congolese partners. Lumumba’s assassination is the founding violence of neocolonialism that ushered in a new era that we still live today.
Framed by a screening of Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (2000)
The final piece of a trilogy exploring the memories and sounds of subterranean spaces, Oda Kaori’s haunting docudrama follows a mysterious figure stalking the borderlands between darkness and light. This poetic study of landscapes finds its anchoring deep in the Okinawan gama caves where stories of life emerge from layers of ancient rock – blooming in the shadows of unspeakable human horror.
Two participatory art projects from the North East where young people were asked to consider their perception of, and experiences in, local communities in Wooler, Northumberland and Byker, Newcastle. The young artists worked with a filmmaker to explore the rich archives of their local areas, uncovering histories and thinking about their identities in relation to notions of place.
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Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Friday night freak out with Junglehussi.
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Unfolding over a single night’s journey into morning, Nightshift (1981) distills the comings and goings of a hotel foyer into an eerie series of moods.
The second feature from acclaimed master of Taiwan’s Second New Wave, Tsai Ming-liang, follows three characters sharing a seemingly empty Taipei apartment…
In the aftermath of a conspiracy-minded father’s sudden death, his daughter inherits his patent for an experimental healing device. Featuring archives from Callie Hernandez’s late father, Invention explores the process of grieving a complicated parent; the ‘fictions and fantasies that follow loss, allowing us to bear disappointment both as individuals and publics in times of national decline’
Melted into the Sun tells the story of Al-Muqanna (The Veiled One), an 8th-century mystic and revolutionary from Khorasan who fought for a just society – questioning land extraction, hierarchy and property. Al-Muqanna’s proto-socialist ideas and magical practices have reverberated throughout the history of Central Asia.
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Two powerful, de-centering works from Eri Makihara that challenge the dominance of conventional cinematic forms and representations of disability.
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Join BFI NETWORK partners BFI Doc Society and Film Hub North for a tea or coffee, followed by a roundtable conversation where you can ask us anything about our film funds and talent development programmes.
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An evolving live video essay from Abiba Coulibaly exploring parallels, strains, convergences and ruptures in on-screen encounters between Black and Arab characters, and the off-screen realities from which they emerged.
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Photographer and filmmaker Celeste Rojas Mugica confronts the political weight of images, revisiting her father’s photographic archive developed in exile in Latin America following activist involvement during the Pinochet dictatorship.
A song of the seasons in sign language, Makihara’s poetic documentary follows a group of deaf people who create visual musical space through motion and expression. A girl sings wind through the trees, a woman screams her soul to the sky, and a couple’s love ebbs with the rolling waves.
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When a supernatural entity plagues a village community in war torn Northern Sri Lanka, a mother loses her son. Set in militarily occupied territory marked by 26 years of civil war, this hybrid docufiction made collaboratively, and secretly, with impacted Tamil communities lyrically examines the stories of missing people. A potent, elliptical protest poem moving with grace and purpose between disparate cinematic forms.
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‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’ ~Wendy Clarke
Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them.
just above the tear duct on each side
A critical look at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the confluence of carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic incentives that determined their influence.
Over 100 filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
The first edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s New Cinema Forum is an invitation to artists, filmmakers, critics and arts/film workers to consider new orientations to creating, exhibiting and working collectively. Offering practical ways to sustain and develop your practice and community, the NCF is a relaxed space to reflect and make connections ahead of our Opening Night film.
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One of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest contributions to the photographic image were stereographs commissioned by the U.S. Army, capturing their war against the Modoc Tribe in Northern California. These stereographs, many of which were staged, are revisited here through violent collisions of image and sound – generating entangled histories of visual technology, genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations.
In collaboration with the Berwick Food and Beer Festival, The Burr of Berwick will host a film screening of Wild Relatives directed by Jumana Manna followed by a discussion at The Straw Yard. The event features a community film screening in a relaxed cinema setting, followed by an informal discussion co-hosted by Sustainable Food Berwick.
Come and enjoy a film & conversation together in the new Straw Yard Theatre during the Food & Beer Festival!
The 2018 film Wild Relatives by Jumana Manna explores simple seeds – how they illuminate biodiversity and international politics from Lebanon to Svalbard. This original film brings perspectives on sustainable food that reach far beyond the future of humanity.
For the Berwick Bridge 400 celebrations come and say hello, at our market stand on Berwick Quayside! Our handy, portable film library will feature BFMAF curated films related to Berwick’s historic infrastructure and our commission Enceindre by Luke Fowler.
The Burr is a film library of stories made in and around Berwick – exploring its past and present, thinking of the future. Berwick residents & visitors can look through the films and watch them on demand. Have a chat with our staff who’ll show you something that interests you, if you’re not sure!
The library is an ongoing project, year-round it will pop up in community spaces in Berwick and host The Burr of Berwick events.
We hope the library triggers conversations and gets the ideas flowing. Maybe you know something about Berwick that we don’t!
What film would you like to see made / or to make yourself in Berwick? Could your interests, or work fuel a filmmaking discovery?
A radiant work of trans friendship and joy unfolds over the course of a day as Aisha bids farewell to her friends in Belo Horizonte. Queer and trans actors play versions of themselves, expressing their individual and collective coming-of-age through the intimacy and wonder of everyday encounters. All That You Could Be is an affectionate portrait of chosen family and of the many forms of love that nurture new beginnings.
Past and present infuse each other with strange energy across films that capture people and places at the borders of transformation. As the sun sets on ancient ruins a shutter opens and closes, and a light in the distance reflects on the glass of a soldier’s lonely watchtower.
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Isabelle Stengers: Building hope on the edge of the abyss
A mysterious house and a magical forest are staging for a playful portrait of Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. Seated amongst verdant overgrowth, dusty ephemera and the occasional stray cat, Stengers expands on the ideas that have shaped her life and work. Intimate and pleasurable, the film delivers an empowering and hopeful message about how to survive in a world of ruins and the potential of collective action.
A shopping list, a wildfire, the urban sprawl and a modern-day pirate. Soft collisions of memory and dream abound across films that trace the sometimes imperceptible impressions that capitalism leaves on our everyday lives.
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Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, Basma al-Sharif’s work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
Join us for a special in focus conversation with Basma al-Sharif, BFMAF24 Filmmaker in Focus led by Dr Viviane Saglier, lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews.
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The second of two screening programmes animating the work of Basma al-Sharif, BFMAF24 Filmmaker in Focus.
Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, her work explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.
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Anti-colonial intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore were all in the heart of Empire – London – in 1947. They were imagining a world after colonialism, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss, what did they conjure?
A Radical Duet is a dual timeline hybrid film about two women of different generations who come together to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play.