18th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival,
3–5 March 2023

New Film Restoration

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

The Interview

(A Entrevista)

Filmed in 1964, the year that marked the beginning of the military coup in Brazil, The Interview is a documentary that condenses the aspirations of a generation and society in continuous transformation. Crafted from interviews with young women, Solberg (re)constructs the conventional, idealised profile of Brazilian women – working through imposed ideas around marriage, sex, happiness, work, and social roles. Her unapologetically feminist lens emphasises women’s agency in society as well as in cinema as active protagonists, whether filming, producing, or acting.

Director

Helena Solberg

Country

Brazil

Run Time

20 mins

Funny, gross and outrageously over-the-top, Jon Moritsugu’s cult classic is a maximally irreverent slice of early 90s punk culture satirising representations of the Japanese-American family unit. Newly restored from eyeball-scorching Panavision, this is Moritsugu’s Asian freak-out magnum opus that shocked America when it was broadcast on television in the mid-90’s. The director himself plays twins (a drug-dealing bad-ass and a closeted math nerd) in a radically dysfunctional family that completely obliterates the noble myth of the “model minority”.

Director

Jon Moritsugu

Country

United States

Run Time

60 mins

Nedarma

(Matka)

Nedarma (Travelling) is a documentary focusing on the Nenets, a nomadic tribe in the northern tundra of Siberia which Anastasia Lapsui was born into. Sumptuous 35mm black and white cinematography captures the landscapes of the Yamal Peninsula and the daily activities of its inhabitants with patience, a visionary perspective and a captivating soundtrack. The film begins by illustrating the Nenets cosmology as a way of leading into a filmic structure that portrays the arc of life from birth to death.

Country

Finland

Run Time

82 mins

Anerca, Breath of Life

(Anerca, Elämän Hengitys)

In Inuit, the word meaning to bring forth a poem is the same as the word to breathe – an act that inspires Finnish filmmaker Markku Lehmuskallio’s poetic ethnography, co-directed with his son Johannes Lehmuskallio. A beautifully expansive film centred on performance and the importance of song, Anerca, Breath of life was shot over several decades with the indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle. People and cultures spanning the borders of Finland, Sweden, Norway, Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Russia, the filmmakers are clear to point out, “It wasn’t these cultures that drew up these borders, rights have been violated.” Speaking against these continued infractions, the film magnificently expresses the joy, pain and energy of these individuals and communities through fleeting, magical moments of performance, conversation and cinema.

Country

Finland

Run Time

87 mins

Seven Songs from the Tundra

(Seitsemän laulua tundralta)

An anthology of stories made collaboratively with the Nenets, an indigenous nomadic people of the Russian tundra under modern Communist rule. Beautifully composed from both archive material and cinematography, the film blends fiction and documentary to produce a vivid portrait of Nenets culture as told and performed by the people themselves. As the first feature film made in the Nenets language, Seven Songs makes an important contribution to contemporary indigenous cinema and a timely intervention into continuing calls for decolonization in Russia.

Country

Finland

Run Time

90 mins

The Blue Mammy

(Sininen Imettäjä)

With understated precision, Markku Lehmuskallio’s The Blue Mammy focuses on the sensitive interplay between sound and image while unfurling a story surrounding Joel, a deaf painter who lives in a small village in Lapland. While he has trouble fitting in with the community of people around him, Joel communes with nature and speaks nonverbally with a spirit. The film distils a wealth of provocative ideas—around artistic creation, alternative forms of communication and the importance of the natural world to human animals—into a stunning filmic tone poem.

Countries

Finland Sweden

Run Time

99 mins

Noon

(Meio-Dia)

Noon is the first fiction film from Helena Solberg, a pioneer and rare feminist presence in the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil in the 1960s. Made during one of the most socially and politically repressive moments of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the film portrays the uprising of a group of children at their day school. It can be read as an allegory for the tensions building among the population and a rejection of the unliveable conditions experienced by communities under oppression.

Director

Helena Solberg

Country

Brazil

Run Time

11 mins

A young cultural activist Purushan (Joy Mathew) is on his way to Delhi when he sees the dead body of Hari, a tabla player and Naxalite. Purushan begins a long journey to inform Hari’s mother of her son’s death, collecting comrades and perspectives on the struggle along his journey.

The screening in Berwick-upon-Tweed will be introduced by Dr. Omar Ahmed, film scholar & international curator of South Asian Cinema.

Recently restored, we are grateful to the National Film Archive of India for their generosity in allowing us to present John Abraham’s film. Unfortunately, it is not available online at this time.

Director

John Abraham

Country

India

Run Time

115 mins

Described by S. Pearl Sharp as “a visual poem on identity”, Back Inside Herself shows a Black woman finding her own sense of self and rejecting hegemonic societal expectations of who she should be and how she should behave.

Director

S. Pearl Sharp

Country

United States

Run Time

4 mins

Described by S. Pearl Sharp as “a visual poem on identity”, Back Inside Herself shows a Black woman finding her own sense of self and rejecting hegemonic societal expectations of who she should be and how she should behave.

Director

S. Pearl Sharp

Country

United States

Run Time

4 mins