New Cinema Competition
For the first time, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s New Cinema Competition includes Short, Medium and Feature length films. The strand encompasses the Festival’s view of some of the most distinctive works of new cinema and artists’ moving image being made around the world today.
All selected filmmakers will share the Berwick New Cinema Award. This year, it is a non-competitive prize created by reallocating funds that would have ordinarily supported filmmakers’ travel and accommodation at the Festival.
Short Films
Way My It Did I
In the Port of Tilbury—a place which historically was the point of entry for migrants to the UK—filmmaker Maria Anastassiou worked collaboratively with a group of people who had recently arrived in the town to paint a portrait of life in the transient space of the Thames Estuary.
Short Films
Up at Night
In a Kishasha neighbourhood faced with near-constant power outages, residents find creative solutions to the lack of light. The promise of a consistent source of electricity is found in the construction of a hydropower scheme, long in development but not yet completed. The practical and philosophical implications of living in darkness are pondered in this short film.
Short Films
This day won’t last
A day that could also be a life. A young man who could also be an older woman. A nightmare that could also be a dream. In Tunisia, while it could also be somewhere else: on the border between the necessity and the fear to make a film, the necessity and the fear for the revolution, This day won’t last is a cooperation with a distance. That is how this self-portrait turns into a group portrait. Clandestine, but straight from the heart: an end that could also lead to a new beginning. —Mouaad el Salem
Short Films
The Name I Call Myself
Rejecting a catch-all definition of blackness while cast across two-screens, The Name I Call Myself unpicks multifaceted LGBTQ identities within the local black British diaspora. References to Audre Lorde and W.E.B. Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness permeate the film, inviting viewers to interrogate multiplicities of Black identity.
Short Films
The Unseen River
Following on from his widely screened and hugely accomplished 2019 short Blessed Land, Phạm Ngọc Lân’s The Unseen River cements the Vietnamese filmmaker’s place as one of the most bold and unique visionaries of contemporary new cinema. The film explores the magic, beauty and intensity of the Mekong River by following several humans and one animal as they all traverse its banks. A young couple visit a pair of monks in a futuristic temple; two former lovers reunite by chance years after their affair; and a spunky black-and-white dog deftly navigates the river landscape tying them all together. Magic and melodrama mix and meld mellifluously along the Mekong.
Short Films
The Cypress Dance
Though one could argue that all the work of artistic duo Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela has been invested in bending and folding reality into something unreal, The Cypress Dance stands as their furthest descent into narrative filmmaking and cinéma fantastique. While several hallmarks of the duo’s previous films are present—a transfixed focus on potent objects; a syncretic visual logic that unites diverse images without narration; and the visual and communicative importance of drawing and mark-making—the film pushes towards territory that feels new and surprising.
Short Films
Patrick
Patrick is made entirely from 16mm film and sound recordings produced during a residency at Headlands Centre for the arts, Marin County. The film focuses on the life and work of Patrick Cowley; a singular producer of dance music who pioneered the hi-NRG “San Francisco Sound” in the late 1970s. —Luke Fowler
Short Films
LIQUID STRANGER
A knife suspended in the air, a PVC trench coat, a slick of red lipstick and multiple stories of murder and obsession all become signifying agents in this camp mash-up of language, narrative and performance. This experimental short film challenges any claim for authenticity—least of all in the eyes of the viewer.
Short Films
Marriage Story
An auto-fiction under the eyes of a female Christ, a marriage as a step into the forbidden land of the holy, a lesbian poem in the language of the divine, a paean to the color red, the world’s slowest rave. —Jessica Dunn Rovinelli
Short Films
Fuel
“Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.” Yu Araki’s enticing short film is a measured double portrait, firstly of a place—the Kushiro Robata restaurant in Hokkaido, northern Japan—as well as a person, the expert griller who slow cooks food at the centre of the restaurant over a bed of glowing orange charcoal.
Short Films
Don’t Rush
Three young men—two brothers and their cousin—meet on a dense summer night to feel the “high” of a dozen “Hasiklidika” songs; Rebetiko songs from the beginning of the 20th century which celebrate the effects of Hashish. But beyond the pleasures of drugs, it is here a question of love, of joy and sadness, a search for freedom and political commitment… Little by little, yesterday’s counterculture, made out of poverty and violence, and built on the pains of exile, reverberates the one of today. —Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky
Short Films
At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other
In consultation with Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Only the Beloved Keeps Our Secrets, a second work was chosen to accompany At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance. Taking the opportunity given by an online Festival, it was felt that this strategy might better simulate the artists’ performance, installation and exhibition making practice for viewers.
