A relative’s likeness surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier and an army base in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s Western expansion. Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time, geography and the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the chaotic circulation of images.
A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave-generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza and competing sights of modern ruin. Precipitated by the artist’s restricted travel to Palestine, the work is an invitation to move between the corporeal self and the cinema space – transcending the limits of borders and the fallibility of memory.
An experimental horror film based on a series of paranormal events that took place in the early ’70s in Hexham, Northern England. In this modern-day folk tale, two brothers become terrorised by ghostly visions after bringing a pair of stone heads into their family home. Combining photographic documentation with personal archive material and dreamlike sequences, Hexham Heads reflects on the haunted nature of family photographs and domestic objects as vessels of trauma.
Reality or Not narrates the intriguing tale of a group of high school students nestled in the northern suburbs of Paris. They embark on a daring experiment, one that seeks to seize control of the reality enveloping them and reshape it according to their own vision. The project marks the latest milestone in the extensive research journey undertaken by the artist Cécile B. Evans, spanning the entirety of their career.
The Burr is a new social space, screening library and discussion series named after the local Northumbrian language. Each day we’ll gather to collectively explore different topics with film and with guests. Come along for a giff-gaff!
A conversation and screening of animations by school children in Berwick and Tweedmouth alongside their inspiration, The Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) – Yuri Norstein’s acclaimed Soviet animation about friendship, fear, and an epic journey through the forest of life that would go on to influence filmmakers worldwide, including Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki.
All are welcome to pop in for this free screening at The Maltings!
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In The Burr’s window space, and inside we present Hanoi-based Lucia Pham’s fizzy animations. She designed Bari, the newly liberated pink Berwick Bear – proudly featured in all of our posters and designs this year!
We invite you to visit a showcase of animations created by students from six schools in Berwick & Tweedmouth with locally based artists Robin Webb and Chloe Smith!
Library: Yrs 3+ 4 at Holy Trinity First School, Yr 4 at Berwick St Mary’s & Norham St Ceolwulf’s Church of England First Schools, Yr 4 at Tweedmouth West First School,
Visitor Centre: Yr 4 Tweedmouth Prior Park First School and Yr 8 at Tweedmouth Middle School (made in Yr 7).
The Burr Film Library contains stories made in and around Berwick
Full of ghosts and memories, Ghassan Salhab’s debut feature film is set in the late 1980s, towards the end of Lebanon’s Civil War. Protagonist Khalil returns to Beirut under a new identity, and to a confrontation with those he left behind following his apparent death a decade earlier. Featuring documentary elements and interviews with the lead actors, Phantom Beirut is a haunting exploration of the official silences and collective amnesias that stalk the lives of those who live through conflict.
BFMAF and artist-run, Brussels-based film and distribution platform elephy invite you to join them for a peer-to-peer roundtable conversation called “Talking Collectively”. Here, artists, filmmakers, arts collectives, producers, distributors, curators, and writers come together to share know-how, triumphs and trials in the field of moving image and visual arts. Register here and propose a question, concern, or talking point on development, creation and (co-)production, distribution and presentation, self-organisation and maintenance.
This event is made possible with the support of the (Re)Connect with the UK grant of Flanders Arts Institute/Kunstenpunt (BE).
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An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films in relation to the complications of home – or hyem in Northumbrian dialect.
When even the most basic understanding of home as residence/shelter is not guaranteed, we open up this theme to an expansive conversation that asks: who has the right to a home? What underlies the commonplace idea of a home? Where does land figure in our perceptions of home?
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BFI NETWORK partners BFI Doc Society and Film Hub North are hosting an informal talent mixer for independent filmmakers and narrative/doc-curious creatives
BFI Mixers bring together local creatives and provide opportunities for growing your network, finding collaborators and connecting with the filmmaking community. There’s no set agenda for these events; we encourage you to introduce yourself to someone new and get talking.
The event also offers the chance to connect with BFI representatives, hear about regional opportunities and short film funding from Jen Bradfield (BFI NETWORK Talent Executive, Film Hub North) and Luke Moody (Head of the BFI Doc Society Fund).
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Artist Debbie Bower (Foundation Press) hosts a drop-in workshop from 12:00 – 17:00 that asks us to envision a new film, and create a poster for it in response to the issues that are important to us.
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Heiny Srour’s often censored, newly restored work is the only film to document a radical historic moment where the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (al-Jabhah al-Sha’abiyah li-Tahrir ‘Uman wa-al-Khalij al-‘Arabi, PFLOAG) momentarily created a secular, feminist and equalitarian society in Dhofar, Oman. The collectively made film shows how The People’s Army liberated a third of their homeland and built the first road, hospital, waterhole, pilot farm and school in the country.
The first 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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When freedom is at stake, who has the right to speak? Two films troubling the politics and poetics of language in public life; how it might be bent and shaped towards liberation of our individual and collective selves.
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Five new films collaboratively combined to form a single work responding to Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s luminous News From Home (1976). Artists Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, Eva Giolo, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Katja Mater, and Maaike Neuville each engage in their own way with the epistolary device of Akerman’s film, as well as recurrent themes of alienation, distance and the mother-daughter relationship.
When markets crash, connections fail and logic boards burn out, what becomes of our augmented selves? A programme of films reflecting the impact of technologies on human identity, consciousness, love and society under late capitalism.
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A raw, moving portrait of motherhood and mutual aid in a Chilean prison, captured by inmates on banned mobile phones. Testimonies from mothers serving long sentences shape a collaborative narrative touching on ways in which friendship, intimacy, resilience and community bloom in conditions of impossibility. Malqueridas is a generative example of the documentary form and a powerful contribution towards the case for abolition.
Nadia El Fani’s pre-Jasmin Revolution espionage fable follows our hero Kalt as she hijacks the airwaves to broadcast political messages from a remote mountain village in Tunisia. Things quickly turn into a sexually charged game of cat-and-mouse with French intelligence officer Julia as the pair struggle with oppositional missions. Brimming with queer and revolutionary potential Bedwin Hacker is keenly critical of the security apparatus of the French state and its targeting of immigrant communities.
A pair of star crossed platonic lovers take flight from society in Isao Fujisawa’s surrealist road trip through 70s Japan. Channelling the avant-garde spirit of the American New Wave, Bye, Bye Love establishes a dazzling universe of psychedelic poetics to narrate Utamaro and Giko’s search for freedom and liberation in the free love era. Nuanced depictions of gender fluidity and queer relationships mark it out as a seldom-seen gem of countercultural cinema
Join us for an after-hours set from multidisciplinary artist and DJ, Alliyah Enyo. As a DJ, Alliyah’s sets build on a meditative approach to sound, queering ancient mythology and folklore whilst centring the harmonies of ambient dance music allongside the polyrhythms of outernational influences. She has further honed her craft as resident DJ at EXIT, a late-night DIY space in Glasgow, where she incorporates choral vocals and ethereal ambient into club atmospheres of psychedelic and percussive leftfield dance music.
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An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films, considering environmental grief, care and survival strategies in difficult times – and the flexible binary between who/what and how/where we nurture.
Join us and the Southern Uplands Partnership in an expansive conversation.
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A twentysomething in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Maputo, Mozambique, perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam, and a woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. The Human Surge is hybrid cinema at its most playful and electrifying – a docufictional exploration of labour and the global digital economy, and an almost spiritual reflection on our collective relationship to the multiple realities produced by imaging technologies.
Maria Fusco is a working-class writer who grew up during the Troubles in Belfast. This Propositions event clashes together two BBC TV plays and an artist’s film to explore the ongoing legacies of censorship, voice and socio-cultural velocity with particular reference to the BBC’s broadcasting ban of 1988 to 1994 of Northern Irish (largely Nationalist) politicians.
The event title is a quote from Reginald Maudling, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1970-72
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Drop in between 12:00 – 17:00 and respond to material in The Burr’s film library selected by artist Kate Liston. Use prompts devised to uncover new meaning in films and artefacts relating to the region’s historic archives of mining, and strategies Kate uses in her new film project Sinkhole.
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Two films set in liminal spaces of exile. In the wake of dispossession, when dreams are deferred and memories bring pain, small acts of collective speaking generate new threads of resistance, liberation, and hope.
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Marking the centenary of her birth, BFMAF presents a new restoration of the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius, one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors. The tenacious Valentina, recently freed from prison in Soviet Russia, heads back to her native Estonia on a quest to find her son Jüri. A Stolen Meeting touches on powerful themes of migration, rootlessness, reconciliation and motherhood at the end of the Soviet Era.
barrunto is a feature length speculative fiction taking place in a future of the past, in a present, ruptured now. It is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus. Through digital, archival and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto sensorially translates bodily unrest, forecasts, or omens via signals sensed in the environment.
Basma al-Sharif’s first feature film is an experimental homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope against hopelessness. Departing from the ancient symbol of the ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail – the film follows a man moving through different landscapes in search of a past lover. A multilingual journey through time and space reflecting on recurrent patterns of destruction and regeneration, representation and erasure.
An informal conversation for critics, writers, and anyone interested in the sustainability of arts writing and publishing in various contexts. We invite Lesley Guy, Kate Liston (Corridor8) and Lyn Hagan (The Journal of Discarded Daydreams) to an open conversation considering how we respond to/reflect on the arts, and how the contexts that stifle might exist in tension with the contexts that nourish. What are the material and conceptual frameworks for sustainable arts publishing – and are these applicable to other mediums, forms and contexts?
A fog clears, revealing new forms of camouflage. From endless desert to outer space, cameras and landscapes reflect each other as vessels for ambiguous and volatile imaginaries playing out beyond our control.
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Nelson Yeo’s beautifully restrained debut feature portrays a complex love triangle of fantasy and desire between three old friends unexpectedly reunited in their middle age. Owing something to the dreamy poetics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a journey rooted in the real gently blooms into a moving and unexpected reflection on the porous boundaries between worlds; touching on issues of ageing, ecological collapse, mature sexuality, and mythology.
An intimate, multifaceted portrait of the Krahô people indigenous to northeastern Brazil. Made in close collaboration with the community, The Buriti Flower sketches the rhythms, dreams and ways of being connecting families working to protect their land from the cyclical violence of encroaching settlements. Blending observational documentary and staged scenes, it depicts the flow of life on a continuum of ever-replenishing strength and resistance.
Join us for an after-hours set from the co-founder of the Beirut Groove Collective, and host of monthly NTS radio show Beirut Daze. Ernesto Chahoud is internationally renowned DJ, compiler and music researcher from Beirut who aims to bring the rarest and sometimes strangest records to people’s ears.
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Meet Mamántula, the boy of everyone’s dreams… and a giant, cross-dressing spider-human with an appetite for revenge and sperm. In an alternate Berlin of brutalist saunas, sepulchral subway corridors and hardboiled detectives, he threads a silken trap. His dream: to cocoon the planet, victim by victim, in his sticky embrace. Will a couple of lovebirds with police badges stop him? Or will the gay community have to step in and take the law into their own hands?
An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films considering what and who we feel responsible for, where a sense of duty lies, and whether this is individual or collectively shared?
With the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment Association, who will be bringing their own converted cine film material, alongside the Northumberland Archives footage of border regiments.
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Audacious and sprawling. Borderless and liberatory. Eduardo William’s follow-up to The Human Surge (2016) (there is no part 2) is a freeform odyssey of sociality and technology shot entirely on a 360-degree camera.
“Unflinching about global woes of wealth disparity, environmental catastrophe, and exhaustion, [Williams] imagines alternative ways of living, rethinking the vast possibilities of the world through new practices of seeing, hearing, and being together.” -Andréa Picard
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.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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.