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 combined programme featuring Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe’s lyrical reflection on intimacy and surveillance through the development of British espionage, and Manuel Muñoz Rivas’ transporting voyage across an expanse of water, half-light and darkness.
Personal, geological and collective histories are reencountered through this series of films. A reckoning is at the core of Myrid Carten’s candid portrait of familial ties in Sorrow had a baby. While the caverns of a corpse mountain become the place and wonder for a curious eye in Rita Morais’ 16mm film Há ouro em todo o lado, where a child’s play and voice relay sage observations of its past transformation. Afro-Diasporic underground disco, house and ballroom culture is source and inspiration for the blissful and rapturous worldmaking within India Sky Davis’ The Lifecycle of Rainbows.
Descendants is presented in collaboration with the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths University of London, selected by artist filmmaker and programme director Gail Pickering.
Amalia Ulman’s debut feature is a dark comedy. El Planeta explores contemporary poverty, deception, class, and escapism through a tender mother-daughter relationship, played by Ulman and her real-life mother.
The Great Indomitable Circus prepares the premiere of their new performance ‘Rights of Man’. Setting up tent in a sleepy northern Spanish town, they devise changes in the style of their show. But their days become mired in meandering vaudevillian arguments, analysing the grandeur of the landscape, the simplicity of the native architecture or the quality of each other’s performances. After much back-and-forth, they end up sticking to their original script.
Introduction by filmmaker Juan Rodrigañez
The film will be preceded by the 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition award presentation
Films by Deborah Stratman, Patrick Staff, Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo, Lesley-Anne Cao, Chema García Ibarra & Ion de Sosa
‘Lazy Girl’ is an emblem of refusal. Like Hammer and Deren she moves to her own rhythm, turning resistance into art. So did Eric, a singular figure whose “proto-practice” was poetry—but he ran out of time. Marx said all politics reduces itself to the politics of time; too bad this leisurely splash in Montánchez is hardly a refusal of capitalism’s tempo but let’s kill time before it kills us.
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.
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.