Cannach MacBride
Join a free workshop exploring queer helplines, archives, and sound imagine futures of community care, facilitated by Conal McStravick.
Join us for a free workshop exploring care as a range of political practices that involve maintenance, pleasure, conflict, sustenance, and scarcity.
The Queer Care Caravan is a library of resources, films and events inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat. Drop in and explore how care and knowledge are shared to support LGBTQIA+ people’s rights and wellbeing.
In nobody’s word Taylor digitises and disintegrates the family archive in order to reframe accounts, destabilise claims and inhabit spaces between fact and fiction, questioning the narrative impulses that inform the stories we tell.
Departing from the Syrian Revolution, before moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy from 1936 Spain, Angola, and Palestine, to the Paris Commune, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts to dismantle the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.
just above the tear duct on each side
A critical look at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the confluence of carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic incentives that determined their influence.
In 19th century Paris, at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse…
Love Tapes – Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
Made as part of ‘Endless Love Tapes’ a collaboration between Wendy Clarke and Kim Coleman that asks, “What tools will allow a participatory video project like this, which began in the 1970s, to continue indefinitely?”
Near the lawless eastern border of Bangladesh and India, a diasporic artist returns with a band of washed up ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker.
Your Touch Makes Others Invisible
[2025 Opening Night] When a supernatural entity plagues a village community in war torn Northern Sri Lanka, a mother loses her son. Set in militarily occupied territory marked by 26 years of civil war, this hybrid docufiction made collaboratively, and secretly, with impacted Tamil communities lyrically examines the stories of missing people. A potent, elliptical protest poem moving with grace and purpose between disparate cinematic forms.
Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya
Mapping the lines of tectonic plates, Malena Szlam follows a constellation of ancient landforms that contour the shifting face of our environment.
[2025 Closing Night] Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.
The people are in turmoil. The ground from which their enchanted garden grows is trembling. Between bushes and trees, flowerbeds and fountains, everyone has lost their way.
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
Water, labour, migration and diasporic memory coalesce in a transporting essay film connecting Jamaica and the UK.
Over 100 filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
Translating as “rising in the east”, Shuruuk follows a dreamlike, diaristic journey from Japan to Tunisia; from Palestine to France.
For Berwick Heritage Open Days, explore the themes of our latest Film Library exhibition Miners’ Weekend School (1984) with a film documenting the same period of struggle and solidarity. Screening followed by a discussion.
For Berwick Heritage Open Days, drop in and create your own striking banner for Berwick inspired by the rich history of banners used by activists – from striking Miners to anti-nuclear protesters. This is a free family-friendly drop-in workshop open to all from 12 – 4pm.
Join free workshop exploring collective approaches to media production.
Our current Vertical Screen Commission is If One Of Those Dots Stopped Moving Forever by Uma Breakdown. Catch the 3 min film through the window of The Burr of Berwick on 22 Bridge Street.
Miners’ Weekend School (1984) is a six-part documentary produced by Amber Films’ Current Affairs Unit during the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike.
Our current Vertical Screen Commission is I’ve been trying to reach you by Anna Chapman Parker and Lyndsay Mann. Catch the 4 minute film through the window of The Burr of Berwick on 22 Bridge Street.
Join a free creative workshop exploring looped animation and free software led by artist Uma Breakdown.
Join a free creative workshop exploring writing and filmmaking through text led by Anna Chapman Parker and Lyndsay Mann.
A Love Tapes-themed night of dancing and karaoke to close out BFMAF25 in style! 🥳
Streetwise hustler Antonio wanders the streets of Buenos Aires in search of money and sex – taking lovers to bed and stealing from them as they sleep. Only his tempestuous mother provides the force that may one day push him to leave the city towards new, alternative forms of happiness. Sacha Amaral’s debut feature is a searing, slow-motion portrait of hedonism and discovery overflowing with characters who sink fully and luxuriously into their authentic selves.
Join us for a special screening of Love Tapes recorded over the Festival. Love Tapes artist Wendy Clarke will also join collaborator Kim Coleman live online to discuss and answer questions from the audience on her Love Tapes project and their collaboration, Endless Love Tapes.
Departing from the Syrian Revolution, before moving through other moments of revolution and experiments in autonomy from 1936 Spain, Angola, and Palestine, to the Paris Commune, the essay film Mapping Lessons reflects on attempts to dismantle the forces of neocolonialism, both internal and external, in the hopes of preparing for the next time.
Tourism, war, and sunsets – films in this programme capture flows of life, the imprints we leave as we move and the many selves we encounter when we arrive.
Brooklyn-based artist-writer Ayanna Dozier works across film, performance, and installation using auto-fiction, surrealist, conceptual, and feminist methods.
Her current research and artwork examines how transactional intimacy redistributes care from the private sector into public, social, and political relations.
A hybrid, participatory movement and performance workshop developed by artist and PhD researcher Conal McStravick and Toronto/Tkaronto-based artist and community activist Mikiki based on the AIDS activist videos of Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Marshall’s videos bookend the propagation of an influential, intersectional mode of AIDS video activism, propagated through UK-Canada transnational video networks.
A programme of new cinema inspired by the hallucinogenic properties of flowers, archival dissonance, and tales of a grumpy entity who talked only because it could not growl.
Part one of BFMAF Propositions programme looking at the work of artist, educator and activist Stuart Marshall. Stuart’s work challenged misrepresentations of homosexuality during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, subverting and critiquing the prevailing language of television and news media.
On the centenary of the founding of the moving image, Sylvia Wynter gave a speech building on V.Y. Mudimbe’s critical observation of the occident’s violent act of “submitt[ing] the world to its memory” through image-making.
Assia Djebar, once Frantz Fanon’s collaborator at the National Liberation Front’s journal El Moudjahid, is a rarely recognised force reclaiming that memory through film.
Curated by artist-filmmaker Gail Pickering, Unsettled Grounds brings together works by graduates of the Goldsmiths MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image, each engaging with landscapes in states of transformation—whether shaped by environmental change, personal histories, or industrial decline.
Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Saturday night shake down with noodle.
A double wedding in a small village turns to high drama when one bride runs away and the other refuses to go on with her marriage. Stars in Broad Daylight remains banned from screening in Syria because of its subversive representation and critical voice exposing how the violence of a patriarchal society seeps into the family unit.
Celebrating the work of photographer and filmmaker Marion Scemema through the lens of her close friendship with artist David Wojnarowicz. The screening programme features several of Scemema’s short works, including a newly retrieved and re-edited cut of RELAX BE CRUEL; a seminal document of the Pier 34 warehouse project in New York.
Writer and filmmker Philip Rizk is joined by Orsod Malik, Executive Director of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and Mai Taha, Assistant Professor in Human Rights at LSE to explore the work of political philosopher and psychiatrist Franz Fanon through the lens of the region he was radicalised in.
A programme of filmic rhythm and blues – of love and fainting cheerleaders, and of our capacity for knowing and feeling in a present infused with trauma.
Departing from a time of coloniality shared by foreign and local powers, where overthrowing a regime is not sufficient to break the shackles that bind.
Framed by a screening of the Victor Jara Collective’s seminal work of political documentary The Terror and the Time (1979) and Moustapha Alassane’s irreverant animated satire Bon Voyage Sim (1966)
In the mind of an eleven year old girl, a single phone call erases her entire life. Iva Radivojevic’s subtle drama reconstructs fragments of childhood memory to trace currents of loss and trauma that followed her family’s displacement from the former Yugoslavia. With a dreamlike structure and a wistful, unsettling atmosphere, When The Phone Rang unearths dissonant relationships between history and memory.
This propositions session features three new works by Morgan Quaintance, bookended by readings from sociologist Laura Harris. Titular film Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London. Seeikokan III and Walking Distance are shorter, ‘miniature’ works produced during the same period of research and production in Tokyo. Filmmaker and translator Chiemi Shimada will lead a Q&A with Quaintance and Harris to conclude the event.
Telepathy, waterways and ban♡its obsessed with Heath Ledger’s Joker connect a programme of new cinema exploring representations of family, intimacy and ancestral memory.
Until his final days, Frantz Fanon was deeply shaken by the murder of his friend Patrice Lumumba carried out in coordination between Belgian and CIA agents and their Congolese partners. Lumumba’s assassination is the founding violence of neocolonialism that ushered in a new era that we still live today.
Framed by a screening of Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (2000)
The final piece of a trilogy exploring the memories and sounds of subterranean spaces, Oda Kaori’s haunting docudrama follows a mysterious figure stalking the borderlands between darkness and light. This poetic study of landscapes finds its anchoring deep in the Okinawan gama caves where stories of life emerge from layers of ancient rock – blooming in the shadows of unspeakable human horror.
Two participatory art projects from the North East where young people were asked to consider their perception of, and experiences in, local communities in Wooler, Northumberland and Byker, Newcastle. The young artists worked with a filmmaker to explore the rich archives of their local areas, uncovering histories and thinking about their identities in relation to notions of place.
Join us at Magdalene Fields Golf Club for a Friday night freak out with Junglehussi.