The 19th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival will host a free programme of Exhibitions around the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed responding to the specificities of space and place.

Cécile B. Evans presents Reality or Not (France, 2023), a video installation that narrates the intriguing tale of a group of students hailing from a high school nestled in the northern suburbs of Paris. This project marks the latest milestone in the extensive research journey undertaken by the artist spanning the entirety of their career.

Adam Piron’s Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image (United States, 2023) interrogates time’s circular ironies, asking what happens when the control of an image is lost. The film follows an unknown man in Ukraine with a tattooed portrait of a relative of a filmmaker in his traditional Native American regalia.

Chloë Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen present Hexham Heads (Belgium, 2024), a modern folktale responding to a series of paranormal events that took place in the early ’70s in Hexham, Northern England. Through photographic documentation, personal archive material and dreamlike sequences, the hauntology of potential traumas is unveiled in domestic objects and family photographs.

Filmmaker in Focus Basma al-Sharif’s exhibition Deep Sleep (Greece, Malta, Palestine,2014).

“A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave-generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza to travel between different sights of modern ruin. Restricted from travel to Palestine, I learned auto-hypnosis for the purpose of bi-locating. What results is a journey, recorded on Super 8mm film, to the ruins of ancient civilizations embedded in modern civilization in ruins, to a site ruined beyond evidence of civilization. Deep Sleep is an invitation to move from the corporeal self to the cinema space in a collective act of bi-location that transcends the limits of geographical borders and plays with the fallibility of memory.”
— Basma al-Sharif.