Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival kicks off its 16th and first entirely online edition today, showcasing the most distinctive works of new cinema and artists’ moving image being made around the world today.

To celebrate the festival’s inauguration, BAFTA-winning sound recordist Chris Watson will reimagine the recordings made for Luke Fowler’s film Enceindre which premiered in Berwick in 2018. Watson will mix new Berwick-based recordings—taken this week by sound artist Martin Parker in Berwick at night—and broadcast them live from the festival’s website and twitch channel. Everyone is invited starting from 8 pm.

Comprising 53 short, medium and feature length films, this year’s selection is available to viewers in the UK on the festival’s new online platform and is expanded through live discussions, commissioned essays and podcasts for three weeks from Thursday 17 September to Sunday 11 October 2020.

The festival includes the New Cinema Competition programme, championing 17 cinematic works from 16 countries and supported by the Berwick Town Council; Propositions, a hybrid of discussion and online screenings that share discoveries encountered through artists’ practice including two films commissioned for the 2020 edition; four Filmmakers in Focus, a space for a deeper investigation into exemplary filmmakers’ work; Essential Cinema, the festival’s pluralist retrospective series showing restored and overlooked classics in the UK for the first time; and the yet to be announced Previews, highlighting forthcoming feature-length films still in the making.

As a response to this year’s challenges in terms of attending screenings, Q&As and discussions in person and in cinema venues, the programme is expanded  through a series of new podcasts: each of the Filmmakers in Focus – Ayo Akingbade, Angelo Madsen Minax, Izza Génini and Payal Kapadia – will be joined in a dedicated conversation by the festivals’ programmers and special guests; the Propositions’ selected artists Renèe Helèna Browne and Tiffany Sia will explore the nature of their work during two separate public discussions with poet Nat Rah and film critic Ed Halter respectively. While more live events are to be announced in the coming days, the festival’s viewers can already explore the expanded programme through long-form writing that have been especially commissioned for the 2020 edition.

From BFMAF’s Director Peter Taylor and its team, we wish you a great 16th festival edition!