The 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) will take place from Thursday 17 September to Sunday 11 October 2020.

The UK’s festival for new cinema and artists’ moving image will present a new online edition where artists’ and filmmakers’ work are expanded through conversation, new writing and podcasts over three weeks this autumn. Audiences throughout the UK and filmmakers and art professionals from across the globe are invited to share in a festival programme that seeks to embody a pluralist and accessible cinema.

In this first announcement, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is excited to introduce key festival programmes taking place online:

• Filmmakers in Focus: Ayo Akingbade (UK), Izza Génini (France/Morocco), Payal Kapadia (India) and Angelo Madsen Minax (US). With uniquely varying and very specific practices across narrative and documentary film, text, media, sound and installation, this strand provides space for a deeper investigation into these exemplary filmmakers’ work. Click here for further details.
• A remodeled New Cinema Competition. All selected filmmakers will share the Berwick New Cinema Award. For the first time it includes both Short and Feature length films, encompassing the Festival’s view of some of the most distinctive and unexpected works of new cinema being made around the world today.
• The Propositions strand is a hybrid of discussion and online screenings that dive deep into new cinema and share discoveries encountered through artists’ and filmmakers’ research, experience and practice.
• Essential Cinema is Berwick Film & Media Art Festival’s pluralist retrospective series and provides a revisionist view of what might be considered classic works of cinema.

Festival announcements to follow include newly-commissioned artists’ work and BFMAF’s New Cinema Competition selection. The complete 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme will be announced at the beginning of September.

Access to the Festival will be through pay-what-you-can sliding scale passes in the UK and professional accreditation will be available worldwide.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and a registered charity.

With the support of the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, Community Foundation serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, Northumberland County Council, Simpsons Malt and Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council.