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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The first edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s New Cinema Forum is an invitation to artists, filmmakers, critics and arts/film workers to consider new orientations to creating, exhibiting and working collectively. Offering practical ways to sustain and develop your practice and community, the NCF is a relaxed space to reflect and make connections ahead of our Opening Night film.
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.
