In Beyond the Field artist Matt Stokes uses folk instruments to create the sounds produced by fauna present in the landscape of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the mid 1700s. This was during the Agricultural Revolution when the flower-rich meadowlands described by writers surveying the Tweed Valley were being drained and replaced with crops. The shift in farming practices altered local biodiversity, effecting the plants, insects, birds and mammals present in the area.
Commissioned and presented by Museums Northumberland at Berwick Museum & Art Gallery
Ben Rivers’ magnificent film of a sloth doesn’t encourage lazy viewing. Rather, it’s an active, engaging and engrossing experience. Time becomes suspended as each breath, every movement becomes a theatrical drama unfolding before our eyes. Perhaps implicitly poking fun at the term ‘slow cinema’, Rivers instead gives us an exquisite example of ‘sloth cinema’.
O’ Pierrot treads the stock, pantomime narra- tive of Pierrot the Clown, told this time from a lesbian, mixed-race, British perspective. The quest for British identity, so often played out in too-real grey-scale is here translated in glowing colour via 8mm stock.
Commissioned by The New Flesh as part of the 2019 residency programme, using public funding from Arts Council England
Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening project focuses on sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren. The Fork in the Road comprises trumpet improvisor Mazen Kerbaj’s composition of a new siren sound using circular breathing, and actor/activist Khalid Abdalla speaking on the siren as the emblematic sound of resistance, oppression and lost futures during the Arab Spring. Shot on 16mm, the film is literally driven by its soundtrack, as the voice becomes a beacon, activating emergency rotating lights.
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Secondary Schools are invited to bring students to watch a dedicated screening of short films from our Fantastika series, introduced by BFMAF Associate Programmer Herb Shellenberger.
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Artist, writer and curator Morgan Quaintance presents his new film Another Decade, alongside a programme of material that extends and details themes within it.
Another Decade combines archive and found footage from the 1990s with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 INIVA conference ‘Towards a New Internationalism’, Another Decade ranges across diverse cultural territory, and is propelled by a sense that very little socio- cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom since that time.
The dynamic tension explored in the work is between, on the one hand, art world actors speaking a truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry. Those who necessarily inhabit a centre of otherness.
These are positions that are drawn out in the selection of films that make up the accompanying programme. A suite of new works made by Quaintance—including a rumination on British Empire and the English countryside set to the words of Jimmie Durham, as well as a work examining the artist’s experiences growing up in South London—will be accompanied by several clips from a video pen pal exchange project facilitated by artist Russell Newell in 1994–95. Exchanged between kids in London and Los Angeles, the videos show participants talking about their neighbourhoods, giving tours of their schools, and discussings aspects of their culture like music, fashion and gangs.
While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical view over the decade, this range of films seek to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, more iconoclastic and more confrontational decade.
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Translation, transformation and transition: the final 2018 Berwick New Cinema competition programme focuses on shifting perspectives, the tension between the real and the virtual, and the relationship between mental and physical landscapes.
Q&A with filmmakers Tako Taal & Callum Hill.
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Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival presents the premiere of Enceindre, a new commission and first collaboration between artist filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain.
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‘Temporal Vertigo’ is a wide-ranging selection of moving image work made by artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria over the last seven years. As schizophrenic in form as it is in chronology, the ten works shown move from essay film to music video, documentary, narrative, performance and all points in between. Included are the two part ‘Gulf Futurism’ essay film The Future Was Desert, which images the desert as a place outside of time; enigmatic science-fiction/documentary hybrid Mothership; and two music videos for Fatima Al Qadiri. This program represents the first retrospective screening of Al-Maria’s formally rigorous and beautifully cinematic work, providing a view of visual and thematic cross-contaminations between many different projects.
Q&A with filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria
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Join us for the first draft of Islanders, a new collaborative work combining live performance with moving image sequences. The work builds on strategies of co-authorship and ways to work together developed over the course of the 2-year project ‘Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects’, which previously led to the live events ‘World is Sudden: Part I’ and ‘Take the Credits’ at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s 2016 and 2017 editions.
Through collaged fragments, the work explores the construction of island identity at a point when the UK’s relationship to other landmasses and the sea around it is in flux. By collectively expanding and re-staging historical diverse representations of islands that exist in the popular imagination, Islanders offers a collage of material to propose critical relationships to states of isolation, political fantasy and the promise of rescue.
Commissioned by CIRCA Projects in partnership with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Middlesbrough Art Weekender, Tyneside Cinema and Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
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Glittering and shimmering moments: the tender touch of your child; the lumbering gait of a dancer dressed in an improbable costume; the luxury of a well-earned day off work. These glances, snapshots and memories are bound together in films alternating between the mundane and fantastic.
Q&A with filmmaker Beatrice Gibson
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Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland presents the world premiere of her film Black Pond, a film that explores the activity within a common land in the south of England. Previously occupied by the 17th century agrarian socialists The Diggers, the land is currently inhabited by a Natural History Society whose occupations include bat and moth trapping, mycology, tree measuring and botanical walks.
After two years of filming on the land, the footage was shown to the members of the Society. Their memories and responses were recorded and subsequently used as part of the film’s narration. The film does not offer a comprehensive record of the history of humans within the area. Instead, it explores more intimately, human’s relationship with and within land and nature.
Following the film, Rinland will dissect and expose materials related to the film, detailing content from a forthcoming publication related to the film. She will stage moments from the Society’s yearly town hall meetings, discuss historical maps and laws, letters of complaint and footage she shot in the same location years before her encounter with them.
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I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. That includes Chauvin-ists; children who disturb corpses; frightened men living in a matriarchal society; or a film crew consisting of a slime robot, talking mandrill and lesbian couple whose relationship crumbles under the glow of bisexual lighting.
Q&A with filmmakers Hardeep Pandhal & Benjamin Crotty
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How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from a Somali & Pakistani background. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind the scenes filming and archive footage of anti-racist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised.
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and supported by Tenderpixel, London
of Violence uses the structure of close-up pillow talk and casual camerawork to engage a dog in intimate digressions. The dog becomes an involuntary participant in human impositions—emotional, physical, linguistic and political.
Co-commissioned by Film London and Channel 4 for Random Acts
Lucy Clout presents a new body of work titled Solvent Magazine, including sculptural and video pieces made during her six-month residency with Berwick Visual Arts and BFMAF. An assemblage of parts that brings together research around close readings of bodies— diagnostic narratives, pleasure and ambiguity are used as ways to think about knowledge, evidence and queer reproduction.
Part-waiting room, part-publishing house, Solvent Magazine presents: a £23.00 USB microscope camera, the story of a temp’s discretion, a new design for privacy screen glass which mimics the saliva of a person with secure attachment style, two piss coloured Perspex doors and a layer of plastic to keep out distractions.
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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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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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The Young Filmmakers’ Competition is back for its 9th year! BFMAF encourages and supports budding young filmmakers in the region through separate competition streams: The Young Filmmakers’ Award (14 years and under) and The Chris Anderson Award (15-19 years old). The Chris Anderson Award is supported by Chrissie Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson, director of Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator.
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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.
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Our Awards programme is central to the Festival and represents some of the most exciting and ambitious contemporary filmmakers working today.
