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Located on Eastern Lane, The Maltings is the festival’s main hub. The Main House is a traditional cinema with seating for over 300.
Eastern Lane, Berwick-upon-Tweed, TD15 1AJ
A radiant work of trans friendship and joy unfolds over the course of a day as Aisha bids farewell to her friends in Belo Horizonte. Queer and trans actors play versions of themselves, expressing their individual and collective coming-of-age through the intimacy and wonder of everyday encounters. All That You Could Be is an affectionate portrait of chosen family and of the many forms of love that nurture new beginnings.
Past and present infuse each other with strange energy across films that capture people and places at the borders of transformation. As the sun sets on ancient ruins a shutter opens and closes, and a light in the distance reflects on the glass of a soldier’s lonely watchtower.
A shopping list, a wildfire, the urban sprawl and a modern-day pirate. Soft collisions of memory and dream abound across films that trace the sometimes imperceptible impressions that capitalism leaves on our everyday lives.
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.
Audacious and sprawling. Borderless and liberatory. Eduardo William’s follow-up to The Human Surge (2016) (there is no part 2) is a freeform odyssey of sociality and technology shot entirely on a 360-degree camera.
“Unflinching about global woes of wealth disparity, environmental catastrophe, and exhaustion, [Williams] imagines alternative ways of living, rethinking the vast possibilities of the world through new practices of seeing, hearing, and being together.” -Andréa Picard
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?
Nelson Yeo’s beautifully restrained debut feature portrays a complex love triangle of fantasy and desire between three old friends unexpectedly reunited in their middle age. Owing something to the dreamy poetics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a journey rooted in the real gently blooms into a moving and unexpected reflection on the porous boundaries between worlds; touching on issues of ageing, ecological collapse, mature sexuality, and mythology.
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.
barrunto is a feature length speculative fiction taking place in a future of the past, in a present, ruptured now. It is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus. Through digital, archival and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto sensorially translates bodily unrest, forecasts, or omens via signals sensed in the environment.
Two films set in liminal spaces of exile. In the wake of dispossession, when dreams are deferred and memories bring pain, small acts of collective speaking generate new threads of resistance, liberation, and hope.
