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Located on Eastern Lane, The Maltings is the festival’s main hub. The Henry Travers Studio at The Maltings is named after the eponymous film and stage actor, whose best known role was guardian angel Clarence Odbody in the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. The Henry Travers Studio a black-box studio space which can seat up to 120.
The Maltings is a large venue on 4 floors which includes a theatre and cinema, The Maltings Cafe Bar and the Henry Travers Studio. It’s a busy venue with a programme of films and theatre. This venue offers step-free access to all spaces and has a lift.
There is ramped access on the left side of the main entrance or 8 wide steps with handrails on both sides. Their are either push doors at the main entrance or power assisted doors with a push button on the left side.
This entrance takes you to the foyer of the venue with a box office desk directly in front, the Henry Travers Studio through a door to the left and The Maltings Cafe Bar through a door to the right.
To access the theatre and cinema auditorium you need to either take the lift or the stairs. The lift is yellow and it is to the right as you come in. The stairs are also on the right with a yellow handrail on one side.
You need to take the lift to the lower levels or go down the stairs.
Room Description: A black square room with red details.
Doorway: Wide double door which is held open before events start.
Seating: Fixed auditorium style pull-out padded seating with padded seat and back and no arms. Loose chairs with padded backs and seats and no arms.
Temperature: Heated and warm, not much ventilation.
Lighting: The lighting in this venue will depend on the event. There may be coloured lights. For most events, the curtains will be open.
Flooring: Smooth black flooring
Sound: No ambient sound from outside the room could be heard.
Patterns: Ceiling lighting rig in a grid, high contrast between the red auditorium style seating and black room.
Smell: Neutral
There are gendered toilets on the -1 lower ground level. There is an accessible adapted toilet with babychange facilities and gendered toilets on the -3 lower ground level. All toilets are accessible via the lift or down the stairs with a handrail. The doorways of the toilets are 91cm wide.
There is food and drink available at the Cafe Bar on the ground floor. The opening times are;
‘Opening hours for 2025 :
Tuesday – Saturday 9.30am – 4pm
Lunches served from 11.45am – 2.45pm
Drinks and home baking served until 3.45pm
Sundays/Mondays – CLOSED
There will be a bar service available one hour before every show/film.’
There are also drinks available at the Theatre Bar on the -1 lower ground floor level before and during events.
There are multiple emergency exits throughout the building, including step-free emergency exits, marked by illuminated green signs which will take you either to the outside of the building or external refuge points. Follow the signs and the directions by staff in the case of an emergency. The closest step-free emergency exit in the theatre is back through to the theatre bar and through a corridor exit marked with a green emergency exit sign. The closest step-free emergency exit in the Henry Travers Studio is through the marked emergency exits within the studio into a glass corridor which leads out to the carpark. The emergency meeting point is across the road outside the Sports Direct.
Eastern Lane, Berwick-upon-Tweed, TD15 1AJ
Meet Animistic Apparatus’s featured artists. In this conversational session Lucy Davis, Chris Chong and Tanatchai Bandasak talk about their artistic engagement with ecology, cosmology, and the politics of environment and land in Southeast Asia. May Adadol Ingawanij introduces the project’s speculative method of exploring animistic relations and artists’ moving image.
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.
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.
Some Interviews on Personal Matters is one of the first feminist films of Soviet cinema and comes to Berwick freshly restored by Arsenal Berlin. Lana Gogoberidze’s narrative follows Sofiko, a journalist who interviews a wide range of women about their lives, desires and domestic labour. Laying bare the connections between the private and political in almost documentary style, the film focuses on the struggle between Sofiko’s independence and her obligations towards her own family. A powerful performance by Sofiko Chiaureli—who viewers will recognize from her iconic role in Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates—is at the center of what is a quite personal film for Lana Gogoberidze, one of three generations of Georgian women filmmakers from her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze (an associate of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Mikhail Kalatozov in the 1930s) to her daughter Salome Alexi.
Sophia Al-Maria discusses her diverse practice—particularly the series of moving image works shown in the ‘Temporal Vertigo’ retrospective screening and The Magical State exhibition in The Magazine—with BFMAF associate programmer Herb Shellenberger and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle. Working at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art, Al-Maria’s practice occupies a singular space within the field of artists’ moving image.
Somewhere in Burma, a forest rich in amber is controlled by the Kachin Independence Army. For most of the inhabitants, amber mining is their only means of subsistence. Working in harsh conditions under constant threat from the government army, these forest villagers live in fear and despair, with a future as dark as the end of the mining tunnel. Blood Amber is a richly cinematic documentary experience.
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
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.
In this seminar, Shireen Seno and John Torres will explore Los Otros’ history and the surrounding context and community of artists and filmmakers both in the Philippines and internationally. They will also discuss their working methods and strategies for production, and will be joined by Richard Bolisay, Viknesh Kobinthan and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle.
Linguère Ramatou returns to Colobane, a once charming village now devastated by poverty, with fabulous wealth and a promise to save her people. But tied to this promise is a deadly bargain: the lover who had betrayed a 16-year- old, pregnant Linguère, must be executed. The villagers—over time and through the hardship of daily survival—had long forgotten the incident, and they are at once confused, horrified and outraged. But soon cowardice sets in, shrouded in silence. While appearing to maintain a good moral conscience, the villagers are unable to resist the dazzling array of consumer goods that Linguère has now placed within their reach. On credit, they begin to purchase furniture and appliances—even those meant for houses without electricity!
Completed just a few years before the filmmaker’s passing, Hyenas is a cautionary tale packed with humorous, compassionate yet explosive scenes. Mambéty forges his narrative with humour and paints characters, spaces, dialogues and gestures with breath-taking images in sumptuous colours. He skilfully and playfully sways us back and forth in time, with slots of 19th century pomp followed by 20th century appliances. Desire, materialism and various modern day artefacts come to test the old values of individual dignity and group solidarity, stressing the enduring, almost mythic status of the conflict between avarice and respectability. Hyenas is nothing short of poetry in motion.
Introduced by artist and researcher Layla Gaye
