Kira Muratova
Camera Trap is a comparative video using moving images made a hundred years apart.
Commissioned by Animistic Apparatus to make a video responding to Southeast Asian animistic practices of communicating with spirits, Tanatchai Bandasak draws inspiration from the presence of prehistoric standing stones in the highlands of Laos.
‘Double Ghosts’ is a multi-part exhibition which traverses the Pacific drawing on historical fragments, traces and ghosts from the coasts of Chile to a mountain cemetery in Taiwan. Exploring the status and potential of unrealised and fragmented histories, the exhibition draws together 35mm film, sound recordings, script fragments, photography and archival material filmed and gathered in Chile, France and Taiwan.
‘Double Ghosts’ was commissioned by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in partnership with Berwick Visual Arts
Fireworks (Archives) is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s offering to the potent spirits of his home region, shot in the sculpture park of a little-known nonconformist temple in the northeast of Thailand.
The Migrant Ecologies Project is a collaborative project that brings together various art practice-led inquiries into questions of culture and nature in Southeast Asia. Animistic Apparatus presents two installations—Railtrack Songmaps and Teak Road—from the Singaporean project.
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Working with moving image collective Film Bee and experimenting with a sequence of Bernadette Mayer’s surrealist writing exercises, Berwick Youth Project have created an uncanny computer game character, an existentialist chicken piece from a 20 nugget share box. This lo-fi film reflects the group’s close reading of screencasts of popular video game intros uploaded to Youtube. The work will be available to view during the Festival at the Visitor Centre and on the BFMAF YouTube channel from Thursday 19 September.
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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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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
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
Tim Alsiofi’s unflinching document of people sheltering in a city under siege reaffirms the importance of transparency and immediacy in documenting crucially important scenes of unfolding history through moving images.
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.
A response to George Clark’s exhibition Double Ghosts, from Taipei based arts-collective lololol (Sheryl Cheung & Xia Lin).
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Kira Muratova’s first solo feature is a beautifully unfolding love triangle: a roaming geologist, played by cult folk singer Vladimir Vysotsky, the USSR’s equivalent of Bob Dylan; his wife Valentina who can’t stand her work; and a woman who arrives at her doorstep, his lover, Nina Ruslanova in her first film role.
Aura Satz presents the UK premiere of her film Preemptive Listening (Part 1: The Fork in the Road) and discusses her wider research on sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren. Her project proposes a speculative re-imagining of emergency signals—it posits the siren’s loud glissando wail as a conditioned and learned signal, one that can potentially be productively rewired.
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Holy Days pictures a strange ballet of both human and non-human animals in a rural landscape. The film opens with a man digging his own grave, only to soon find solace in a mysterious companion.
Join Cowboy and Indian on their misadventures to the centre of the earth!
A Town Called Panic will be screened after school on Thursday at Kaleidoscope (59 Marygate). Places are free but should be booked via bfmaf.org or the Maltings Box Office.
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.
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Join us to celebrate the opening of George Clark’s Double Ghosts exhibition—jointly commissioned with Berwick Visual Arts—for The Gymnasium and Tanoa Sasraku’s O’ Pierrot, the product of a four month residency with The New Flesh, based at Academy Costumes in South-East London. Refreshments and merriment aplenty.
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After a devastating earthquake, Nga, an old elephant and probably the last of its species, and Sanra his mahout are about to embark on a journey to find the mythical elephant’s graveyard. A group of poachers follow them closely, while a journey of discovery and mourning starts. The viewer becomes the protagonist on a sonic trip into the cemetery and beyond.
Q&A with filmmaker Carlos Casas
UK premiere of Cemetery presented jointly by BFMAF and Tate Modern
Yevgeniya, a divorced mother, is very devoted to her only son, Sasha. When she lets him vacation with his father, he comes back a changed person and tells her that he does not want to live with her anymore, and wishes to move to Novosibirsk. As a portrait of a woman unravelled, this film forms a diptych with Brief Encounters. Both are shot in achingly poetic black-and-white. Both are about the nature of romance, even if it’s a romance between mother and son, which Muratova proposes as a metaphor for any male-female relationship. Finally, both films are astonishing portraits of unconventional women, and the pain of yearning, impulsive, irrational loves.
Getting to Know the Big Wide World, the chef d’oeuvre of the young Muratova, transforms a conventional love triangle (two men, one woman, all construction workers) into a vividly elusive poem on the origin and inexplicability of love. Through ordinary ‘Soviet’ characters she reveals expressive individuals, transforming the industrial construction site into a tender scene of unspoken tragedies.
A distraught widow who has just buried her husband is about to destroy everything and everybody, but mainly herself. An exhausted man tries to find an escape from his daily chaos and routine in perpetual sleep. While their paths don’t really cross, the film implies they both suffer from the titular syndrome—a weakness, enervation, fatigue that is equally concrete and allegorical.
Love affairs, horse races and male duels unfold at an isolated hippodrome by the sea inhabited by excessive, eccentric characters who strut and pose, fanatically declaim and obsess about their own ‘enthusiasms’. The film’s extravagant monologues were written and performed by the charismatic Renata Litvinova, whose screen presence channels equal parts Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and the loquacious self-possession of a Warholian superstar. Litvinova, a professional screenwriter was discovered by Muratova, immediately becoming a member of her on-screen ‘family’, as well as a cult diva of the new Russian cinema.
A woman is paid a surprise visit by her long-forgotten classmate, who needs her advice: should he choose a wife or a lover? An outrageously burlesque mise-en-scène is repeated many times over, each in a different setting and performed by new actors. While the viewer doesn’t immediately recognise this, the scenes are screen tests with various actors. Towards the finale, Muratova employs a trick: the black-and-white images are disrupted and the film continues in colour. In the screening room, the producer and a potential investor, a sugar magnate, discuss the material of the uncompleted film. The director has died and there is no money to finish the movie. Muratova asked the big stars of Russian cinema and stage (including Renata Litvinova, Oleg Tabakov and Alla Demidova) as well as the amateur actors from her previous films to collaborate on Eternal Homecoming, exploring the possibilities of aesthetic transformations between past and present.