Programmes
9 March 2024
Nelson Yeo’s beautifully restrained debut feature portrays a complex love triangle of fantasy and desire between three old friends unexpectedly reunited in their middle age. Owing something to the dreamy poetics of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a journey rooted in the real gently blooms into a moving and unexpected reflection on the porous boundaries between worlds; touching on issues of ageing, ecological collapse, mature sexuality, and mythology.
7 March 2024 • Free Entry
The Burr is a new social space, screening library and discussion series named after the local Northumbrian language. Each day we’ll gather to collectively explore different topics with film and with guests. Come along for a giff-gaff!
9 March 2024
An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films, considering environmental grief, care and survival strategies in difficult times – and the flexible binary between who/what and how/where we nurture.
Join us and the Southern Uplands Partnership in an expansive conversation.
9 March 2024
Marking the centenary of her birth, BFMAF presents a new restoration of the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius, one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors. The tenacious Valentina, recently freed from prison in Soviet Russia, heads back to her native Estonia on a quest to find her son Jüri. A Stolen Meeting touches on powerful themes of migration, rootlessness, reconciliation and motherhood at the end of the Soviet Era.
8 March 2024
Nadia El Fani’s pre-Jasmin Revolution espionage fable follows our hero Kalt as she hijacks the airwaves to broadcast political messages from a remote mountain village in Tunisia. Things quickly turn into a sexually charged game of cat-and-mouse with French intelligence officer Julia as the pair struggle with oppositional missions. Brimming with queer and revolutionary potential Bedwin Hacker is keenly critical of the security apparatus of the French state and its targeting of immigrant communities.
10 March 2024
An open, drop-in conversation inviting responses to the Festival’s programme of films considering what and who we feel responsible for, where a sense of duty lies, and whether this is individual or collectively shared?
With the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment Association, who will be bringing their own converted cine film material, alongside the Northumberland Archives footage of border regiments.
Run Time
60 mins
3 – 5 March 2023 • Free Entry
Drawing on the filmmaker’s experiences growing up in a large Samoan family in the largely Pākehā populated region of Nelson, Hidden Amongst Clouds newly imagines stories of Samoan mythology and questions the moral virtues they uphold. The work embraces a 1990’s aesthetic, harking back to supernatural fantasy television series and their embedded symbolisms, reflecting Ulutupu’s ongoing interest in themes of belonging and the importance of recontextualising and reimagining narratives of colonial stereotypes.
3 – 5 March 2023 • Free Entry
A quiet, atmospheric portrait of an elderly store owner in the small town of Yagi, Kyoto Prefecture. Yu Araki’s camera carefully observes the curiously named Mr. Yagi’s daily routine and interactions with local customers during the last autumn season for his shop, which is no longer in business. Documenting the passage of time in parallel with processes of depopulation, the title Tempo conjures a double meaning; playing on the Japanese word “tenpo (店舗)” which means “store”.