7 January 2021
Run Time
92 mins
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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.
This 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.
Steps and Lifts: To access the theatre and cinema you need to get the lift or stairs to the lower ground levels. The lift has a maximum capacity of 630kg and can fit one wheelchair or mobility scooter at a time. The circle has an accessible seating section which is on the -1 lower ground level. This is accessible via the lift or down 16 stairs. There is more accessible seating options in the stalls which is on the -2 lower ground level. This is accessible via the lift or down 32 stairs and through the stage bar. If you are sitting in a non step-free seat, there are stairs to the seats and they have silver contrast edgings. All stairs outside and inside the auditorium have a handrail.
Room Description: A large theatre auditorium with a stage and cinema screen, raked seating, additional seating on a circle mezzanine and in boxes.
Doorways: Doorways into the auditorium are 112cm wide.
Seating: Fixed auditorium style padded seating with padded seat and back and no arms. Loose chairs with padded backs and seats and no arms, spaces for wheelchairs.
Temperature: Heated and warm, not much ventilation.
Lighting: Lighting in the stairways, corridors and theatre bar are from shaded lamps and are generally dim and warm. There are some bright round shaded fluorescent lights on the walls of the corridor on -3 level and in the toilets. In the auditorium it will be softly lit with a large colourful splash screen projected. There will be very low music playing.
Flooring: Smooth grey-beige carpets.
Sound: It is a large space and the ambient noise before, after and during breaks from people chatting can be quite loud.
Patterns: The walls in the corridors are white or red and are made from a combination of large blocks and small bricks creating a grid-like pattern. There is contrast between the red walls and chairs and the vertical black beams and gold features in the auditorium.
Smell: Neutral
Temperature: Heated, warm, hot
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
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
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.
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
When the Cat Comes is one of the more quietly subversive films of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and its visual flair, storybook fantasy and absurd humour make it fun for viewers of all ages. The film won the Cannes Special Jury Prize in 1963 thanks to the winning combination of director Vojtěch Jasný, writer Jirí Brdecka—known for his collaborations with animator Jirí Trnka—and lead actor Jan Werich, writing his own dialogue in the dual role of Comrade Oliva and the Magician.
The Halt is set in a phantasmagoric dystopian future where madmen control Manila after massive volcanic eruptions have plunged Southeast Asia into darkness. Berlin, Venice and Locarno award-winning director Lav Diaz’s latest film is a potent sci-fi epic. Holding a mirror to present-day despots and invasive surveillance, it concentrates power in the hands of a solitary young woman. Spinning a tale that urges recovery from collective cultural amnesia, The Halt is an immersive and truly one-of-a-kind experience.
Introduction by filmmaker Lav Diaz
There will be a 15 minute interval during the screening
Films by Miko Revereza, Ayo Akingbade, Daisuke Kosugi and Jenny Brady
Ricocheting from point to point, this might lead to discovering new people, ideas and forms of communication, breeching familiar spaces, close and far. Or is it perhaps the eternal return, reconnecting us with family, compatriots or community?
Q&A with filmmakers Miko Revereza, Ayo Akingbade, Daisuke Kosugi and Jenny Brady
Films by Dani ReStack & Sheilah ReStack, Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil & Jackson Polys, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
History is what’s happening. It’s constantly unfurling never static and always in flux. Rather than being resigned to it, it’s incumbent upon us to shape and mould it into the gooey, slimy substance that we want our world to resemble. The time is now, the place is everywhere, all at once…
Q&A with filmmakers Emily Vey Duke, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
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.
This adults-only screening pairs two erotic fairytales by women artists. Niki de Saint Phalle’s rarely-screened 1976 feature Un rêve plus long que la nuit is a fairytale trip through the female erotic psyche. Young Camelia, searching for the meaning of life, death and love, finds herself transported to such unpredictable settings as a dreamlike orgy or a raging battlefield. Mari Terashima’s 1989 short Hatsukoi is a silent, gestural film of gothic symbolism, a story of first love that never comes true.
