This Vertical Screen Commission is part of an ongoing series, presented with our partners Create Berwick. Vertical videos have become the standard online, viewed mostly on smartphones and boasting short and punchy content reminiscent of shop window displays.

Vertical Screen Commissions can be viewed any time, in the shop front window of The Burr of Berwick venue space, also home to the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival offices.

I’ve been trying to reach you (2025)

By Anna Chapman Parker and Lyndsay Mann

3:52 min, HD, silent

On show 19 July – 30 August 2025

Made for a giant proxy phone screen in a shop window, I’ve been trying to reach you asks what it means to observe the street within the glassy space of a messaging app. In a context of fleeting and fragmentary attention, the film invites an intimate cinematic encounter conducted through reflected glances and pinged text. A hybrid text exchange sampled from AI-generated image descriptions, performance scripts and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando plays with the poetics of passing by, offering moments that slip between reflection and interruption, dialogue and disconnect.

Lyndsay Mann is an artist-filmmaker based in Berlin and Edinburgh. Her work connects archives, institutional histories and objects, and the ways these shape current communities of practice. lyndsaymann.com

Anna Chapman Parker is an artist and writer based in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Her work navigates relationships between drawing, text and the body, particularly in connection with observation practices, as in her recent book Understorey (Duckworth Books, 2024). annachapman.co.uk