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.
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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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?
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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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.


Sepa: Our Lord of the Miracles • After the Dust
A pairing of films made in Peru exploring the politics and poetics of justice, liberty, remembrance and forgetting. Walter Saxer’s Sepa: Our Lord of the Miracles traces stories of people lost to the enclosed reality of the prison system, whilst Colectivo Silencio’s After the Dust reanimates voices of resistance often-willingly forgotten within the enclosed system of the nation state.
A programme of short works traversing hallucinatory dreamscapes, contested landscapes, and the precarious movements of bodies through time and space. Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel screens alongside contemporary artists, Basim Magdy, Marwa Arsanios and Fox Maxy.
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As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Aljafari takes the title from a short story by Borges and describes the work as a “cinematic self-portrait” – questioning our interpretation of screen violence, its relationship to real-world horrors, and troubling our positionality as spectators.
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Films by Leonor Noivo and Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky
No human is an island. Two short films of grand vision—and great difference—follow their lone protagonists as they negotiate between inner and outer worlds. From the barren but hauntingly militaristic island of Lemnos to a verdant Portuguese forest, both humans rearrange fugitive blocks of cunning and experience to find their point of view.
Q&A with filmmakers Leonor Noivo, Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky
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After living wild for a week, Astrid’s 13-year-old son Phillip returns home without saying a word. Only gradually does everyday life get back on track. Astrid now finds herself confronted with questions that provide a whole new perspective on her middle-class existence and her career in Berlin’s cultural sector. At home, it becomes more and more difficult for this single mother to accept that her son is leading his own life. The family may be disintegrating, but only to form itself anew.
Supported by Goethe-Institut London
Bugs and Beasts Before the Law explores the history and legacy of the “animal trials” that took place in medieval Europe, in which animals—and other non-humans, such as insects and inanimate objects—were put on trial for various crimes and offenses, ranging from trespassing and thievery, to assault and murder. This history of colonial law-making forged political and sometimes profane relationships between humans and animals. Bambitchell’s essayistic film reimagines common perceptions of legal history and, in doing so, produces a world where past and present, fiction and non-fiction, human and animal fuse. —Bambitchell
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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Agnieszka Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself.
The film borrows its title from a poem by Polish poet of the realist/positivist style Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910). The poem ‘What the sun has seen’ recounts in a childish style the quotidian, peaceful rural activities and happy family life of the nation in the countryside, as observed by the sun on its daily journey across the sky. Polska offers her own dark, ironic version of the poem, dealing with contamination by information (information waste) and the role of the ‘helpless observer’ who, like the ‘Angel of History’ in the well-known adage by Walter Benjamin, can only look at the debris piled by lived time without being able to intervene.
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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.
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A pick ‘n’ mix bag of some of the best short animations from all over the world – all dialogue-free and specially selected to delight the whole family, from age three upwards.
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From hundreds of entries responding to our Border Crossing theme, we bring you some of the best short films and artists’ videos from across the world as part of the 2nd Inntravel Short Film Award.