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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
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.
Films by Steve Reinke, Onyeka Igwe, Rajee Samarasinghe and Ja’Tovia Gary
From Harlem to Giverny, patrilineal tales to Artaud, nature will give way to febrile artifice. What dizzying force is this—throwing us between opposites: deafening silence vs. slide-projector clicks; glitch-y celluloid vs. HD; projected futures pressed up against the archive? But there’s calm around the corner—a reprieve from the chaos of subjection. “Can I live?”, one voice enquires, rhetorically. Consider how the subtext to our fervid biopolitical project.
Q&A with filmmakers Steve Reinke and Onyeka Igwe
Marwa Arsanios’ Who Is Afraid of Ideology? focuses on ecology, feminism, social organization, nation-building, war and economic struggle. In its formal construction, the film lays bare some of the documentary form’s devices to create a record of shared living and organising— voiced by those within, and in proximity to, the communities documented. Arsanios presents us with two radical women’s movements and their means of survival as a possible solution to the degradation of the commons and the destruction of the earth.
Q&A with Marwa Arsanios
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Set in 1987, soon after the People Power Revolution which led to the fall of president Marcos, Nervous Translation follows eight-year-old Yael. A shy and uneasy girl, she listens endlessly to the cassette tapes recorded by her father, who has spent years away from home working in Saudi Arabia. When she hears an advertisement for a pen that will give her a ‘wonderful life’, she decides to spend all her savings on this miracle pen.
Yael’s world is small and tender—she likes to play cooking on her mini stove—but the real world comes knocking: a typhoon approaches the Philippines. Giving a voice to this quiet girl in a perceptive, playful film full of jump cuts, sensitive sound design, ’80s music and even an odd surrealist intermezzo, Seno empathetically captures the innocence and uncertainty of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world, although she is surrounded by it.
Introduction by filmmaker Shireen Seno
UK premiere of Nervous Translation presented jointly by BFMAF and Tate Modern
The film will be preceded by the 2018 Berwick New Cinema award presentation
