The free Exhibitions programme features films from around the world, forming a constellation across Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Launching at our new BFMAF venue on 22 Bridge Street will be the World Premiere of Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025), a pilot project by American artist Wendy Clarke in collaboration with Kim Coleman. Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes, comprises over 2,500 three-minute videos where people talk to the camera about their personal experience with love. Endless Love Tapes is a manual and the series of new Love Tapes made in the UK without direct communication with the artist, aims to further democratise the process Clarke began in 1978 and allowing the project to continue indefinitely as Clarke had always wanted.

We invite you to create your own Love Tapes and view a selection of earlier Love Tapes. Love Tapes made during the festival will be screened after a live conversation between Clarke and Coleman and the installation will remain on show after the Festival.

Some Strings (Various, 2024) is an ensemble work that has so far brought together over 100 artists, producing nearly 6 hours of short films in an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine. The project acts as both a legacy and a response to Palestinian poet and teacher Refaat Alareer, targeted by the Israeli government, whose last poem – If I Must Die – published five weeks before his murder, encourages those who survive him to create a kite – a long-standing symbol of resistance – with bits of string.

Cáit and Éiméar McClay present just above the tear duct on each side (United Kingdom, Ireland, 2024), in the UK Premiere of a work that looks critically at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the complexity of land colonisation and the persecution of marginalised individuals in the rural north of the Republic of Ireland.

The UK Premiere of Adam Piron’s Black Glass (United States, 2024) examines the entangled histories of visual technology and the genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations by white settlers through a violent collision of image and sound.

Stepney Western (United Kingdom, 2025) by Harry Lawson is a documentary made in collaboration with a group of young horse riders from the inner city Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle, sits at the porous boundary between fact and fiction, combining recontextualised iPhone clips shot by the riders, archival material from North East Film Archive and Lawson’s own footage. The presentation of this film runs parallel to a public exhibition at Newcastle Contemporary Art (15 March – 27 April).