The first edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s New Cinema Forum is an invitation to artists, filmmakers, critics and arts/film workers to consider new orientations to creating, exhibiting and working collectively. Offering practical ways to sustain and develop your practice and community, the New Cinema Forum will primarily take place on Thursday 27 March 2025, providing a relaxed forum to reflect and make connections ahead of our Opening Night film. There will be further opportunities to join roundtables over the Festival weekend.

You will need to purchase Accreditation to join this event.

Due to limited capacity, please reserve a spot to join us on Thursday 27 March 2025. Take a look at the programme below:

Contexts for Production

12.00 – 13.00

The New Cinema Forum begins with an open conversation between participants and attendees considering the contexts we are all working in. Join a conversation considering the challenges, contradictions, and persistent sites of possibility that emerge. Anchoring the day with a shared framework, we will discuss support mechanisms, alternative structures, and new orientations to take in light of ever-changing circumstances.

Mutual Support

13.30 – 14.30

Working locally and collaboratively has always been essential for developing and sustaining creative communities in the arts. Such an outlook has increasingly opened up to participation, engaging people of all ages and backgrounds into conversation with arts and culture. How can we uphold these spaces, communities and practices in trying times? Join artists, curators and organisations nurturing contexts for collaboration and exchange.

This event will welcome Lydia Honeybone (Co-founder, OFFLINE Glasgow), Adam Pugh (Director, Art Network North East), Harry Lawson (Artist & Documentary Filmmaker) with more participants to be confirmed.

Working with Archive

15.00 – 16.00

Archives present a sometimes confusing terrain for artists and curators to navigate. Archival documentation, film and ephemera also offer an opportunity for histories to become renegotiated and entangled in the present. Is preservation just a matter of preserving formal objects, or also a question of retaining this ability to engage with multiple temporalities? To keep history in view from the perspective of a fast-moving present? Join artists, curators and archivists working with an expansive view of what the archive can offer.

This event will welcome Conal McStravick (Artist, educator & writer), Hope Strickland (Artist and Filmmaker) and Charlotte Procter (LUX, Cinenova).

Thinking Through Practice

16.30 – 17.30

At a moment of generative reciprocity between the arts and academia, research-based practice has gone beyond traditional circumscribed territories – developing research that might be practically undertaken, presented and engaged with anew. Join a conversation with artists and researchers to consider the formal and structural nature of research-based practice, how it finds a place in the world and where it stands in relation to the two institutions it straddles.

This event will be facilitated by Viviane Saglier (Lecturer in Film Studies, University of St. Andrews), and will welcome Philip Rizk (Filmmaker) with more participants to be confirmed.