Berwick New Cinema Competition
The Berwick New Cinema Competition’s 23 selections comprise our view of some of the most distinctive and unexpected works of new cinema and artists’ moving image being made around the world.
Disregarding boundaries of genre, form, filmic conventions and expectations, these are vital works, imbued with a sense of liveness and agency in their resolute visions.
The 2019 Berwick New Cinema Competition was researched and selected by Festival Director Peter Taylor, Associate Programmers Letitia Calin and Herb Shellenberger, Programme Coordinator Hamish Young and 2019 BFMAF Programming Fellow Tendai John Mutambu.
The Berwick New Cinema Competition is kindly and proudly supported by Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council.
Films by Leonor Noivo and Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky
No human is an island. Two short films of grand vision—and great difference—follow their lone protagonists as they negotiate between inner and outer worlds. From the barren but hauntingly militaristic island of Lemnos to a verdant Portuguese forest, both humans rearrange fugitive blocks of cunning and experience to find their point of view.
Q&A with filmmakers Leonor Noivo, Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky
Run Time
Films by Miko Revereza, Ayo Akingbade, Daisuke Kosugi and Jenny Brady
Ricocheting from point to point, this might lead to discovering new people, ideas and forms of communication, breeching familiar spaces, close and far. Or is it perhaps the eternal return, reconnecting us with family, compatriots or community?
Q&A with filmmakers Miko Revereza, Ayo Akingbade, Daisuke Kosugi and Jenny Brady
Run Time
Films by Dani ReStack & Sheilah ReStack, Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil & Jackson Polys, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
History is what’s happening. It’s constantly unfurling never static and always in flux. Rather than being resigned to it, it’s incumbent upon us to shape and mould it into the gooey, slimy substance that we want our world to resemble. The time is now, the place is everywhere, all at once…
Q&A with filmmakers Emily Vey Duke, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka and Heidrun Holzfeind
Run Time
Films by Steve Reinke, Onyeka Igwe, Rajee Samarasinghe and Ja’Tovia Gary
From Harlem to Giverny, patrilineal tales to Artaud, nature will give way to febrile artifice. What dizzying force is this—throwing us between opposites: deafening silence vs. slide-projector clicks; glitch-y celluloid vs. HD; projected futures pressed up against the archive? But there’s calm around the corner—a reprieve from the chaos of subjection. “Can I live?”, one voice enquires, rhetorically. Consider how the subtext to our fervid biopolitical project.
Q&A with filmmakers Steve Reinke and Onyeka Igwe
Run Time
Films by Deborah Stratman, Patrick Staff, Philbert Aimé Mbabazi Sharangabo, Lesley-Anne Cao, Chema García Ibarra & Ion de Sosa
‘Lazy Girl’ is an emblem of refusal. Like Hammer and Deren she moves to her own rhythm, turning resistance into art. So did Eric, a singular figure whose “proto-practice” was poetry—but he ran out of time. Marx said all politics reduces itself to the politics of time; too bad this leisurely splash in Montánchez is hardly a refusal of capitalism’s tempo but let’s kill time before it kills us.