10 September – 12 September, 2021
Festival 2021
Festival 2021
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Anti-Archive
Since its founding in 2014, the Cambodian film production company Anti-Archive has emerged as a formidable platform through which the new generation of filmmakers in Cambodia can develop their artistic visions, realise ambitious productions and collaborate with others internationally.

Berwick Young Filmmakers
Intended Ten: The Fate of The Middle Place is 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.

Essential Cinema
Essential Cinema is our pluralist retrospective series that provides a revisionist view of what might be considered canonical works of cinema. The 2021 selection brings new restorations and digitisations that evoke connections between political and spiritual awakenings, taking in projects from India, Cuba, USA and Palestine.

New Cinema Awards
The Berwick New Cinema Competition becomes the Berwick New Cinema Awards—a non competitive prize that is shared between the filmmakers. The strand encompasses a selection of work that has most spoken to our group of programmers this year and includes what we feel is some of the most distinctive works of new cinema and artists’ moving image being made around the world today.

Focus
Nguyễn Trinh Thi
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.

Online Exhibitions
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s 2021 Online Exhibitions take the place of its usual physical ones in Berwick. Here you’ll find places of radical world building, virtual spaces to gather and to contemplate.

Propositions
Propositions is the Festival’s hybrid of discussion and online screenings, interactive games and performances. The artists in this strand share discoveries encountered through their research, experience and practice.

Focus
Rajee Samarasinghe
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.

SPS Community Media
BFMAF is pleased to present two recent films by SPS Community Media which provide a clarifying backdrop to urgent news stories such as the ongoing Farmer’s Protests in India, rooted in the experiences of individuals and families living in Madhya Pradesh, one of the most populous states in India.

Work in Progress
Returning for a second edition, Work in Progress is a Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme strand highlighting forthcoming feature-length films. For 2021’s Work in Progress, we will focus on Congolese director and visual artist Nelson Makengo’s Rising Up at Night (2022) his feature film debut currently in production.
