Meriem Bennani
Meriem Bennani (b. 1988 in Rabat, Morocco) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humour. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures and immersive installations – each composed with a subtle agility to critique contemporary society; its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Bennani’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, Art Dubai, The Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING and The Kitchen in New York.
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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.
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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.
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Join Charlotte Prodger and Laura Guy for an informal discussion.
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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.
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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).
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Join Peggy Ahwesh and Laura Guy for an informal discussion
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Join Hardeep Pandhal and Amanprit Sandhu for an informal discussion
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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”.
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Join Ilona Jurkonytė, curator of the programme Ultramarine: The Sea as Political Space and Artistic Director of the Kaunas International Film Festival, Lithuania, for an informal discussion.
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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.
