We are excited to announce the 2020 Filmmakers in Focus for the 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, taking place from Thursday 17 September to Sunday 11 October!

(from clockwise) Ayo Akingbade, Angelo Madsen Minax, Izza Génini and Payal Kapadia

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) has selected four Filmmakers in Focus for its 2020 online Festival. With uniquely varying and very specific practices across narrative and documentary film, text, media, sound and installation, this strand provides the space for a deeper investigation into these exemplary filmmakers’ work:

Ayo Akingbade (UK) is an artist, writer and director whose work addresses notions of urbanism, power and stance. Akingbade’s films Tower XYZ (2016), Street 66 (2018) and Dear Babylon (2019) comprise the social housing trilogy entitled No News Today. The former film received a Special Mention Award at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and won the inaugural Sonja Savić Award at Alternative Film/Video Festival (Belgrade). She is a recipient of the Sundance Ignite Fellowship and exhibited in ‘New Contemporaries’. Akingbade is currently developing a feature debut.

Angelo Madsen Minax’s (US) filmography spans documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film. Madsen’s prolific practice transgresses form, style and narrative to explore queer and trans intimacies, chosen and biological structures of kinships, cosmic, natural and technological phenomena. His works have been screened and exhibited at the European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück), the Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), British Film Institute, Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) and REDCAT (Los Angeles). His second feature documentary, North By Current (2021), is currently in production.

Izza Génini (France/Morocco) works in narrative documentary exploring diasporic identity and traditional Moroccan musical heritage. In the 1970s, she founded the distribution company SOGEAV (now OHRA) with Louis Malle and Claude Nedjar, producing and distributing Moroccan and African cinema. Shot over the span of four years, her epic series of eleven documentaries Maroc, corps et âme (Morocco, Body and Soul, 1987-1992) is a rich sensorial testimony to Moroccan music, land and light. Other works include Return to Oulad Moumen (1994) and Nûba d’or et de la lumière (Nûba of Gold and Light, 2007).

Payal Kapadia (India) is a director and artist. With a distinctly ethereal and embodied perspective, Kapadia’s films slip between memory and dream, gesture, landscape and domestic spaces. Her feature debut, All We Imagine As Light is currently in development and supported by awards from IFFR/Hubert Bals Fund and Cannes Cinefondation. Payal’s short films have screened at Cannes and Berlinale, and were awarded at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), Mumbai International Film Festival and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.

The 2020 Filmmakers in Focus strand has been curated by BFMAF’s programming team – Festival Director Peter Taylor, Programmer Herb Shellenberger, Associate Programmer Ana David and Programming Fellows Christina Demetriou and Myriam Mouflih.