Free Entry
The Burr of Berwick Film Library is a community video archive and exhibition series. Open and evolving, the Burr Film Library offers a shared space for screenings, discussions, and creativity.
Based at 22 Bridge Street, the Film Library is open Saturdays 12 – 4pm. The Library also travels to present pop-up events at spaces and occasions around town.
With the potential to speak to personal memories and experiences, the films reflect and respond to real-world topics. Everyone is invited to pop in for a cuppa and share ideas and stories, or delve into the Library’s themes through events and workshops.
Image credits for selected ephemera featured in the archive:
Bus Advertising – Draft designs • Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 1993
Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Edinburgh Lesbian Line Annual Report Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 1986 – 1987
Photograph of Bus Advert • Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • c. 1993
Speaking Out Project Zine 5 • Evan • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 2022
Queer Care Caravan
The Queer Care Caravan is an artist residency hosted by The Burr of Berwick, exploring resilient LGBTQIA+ community-led care across a Film Library exhibition, workshops and screenings.
Inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat, 3 artists from Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada spend time in Berwick-upon-Tweed sharing radical approaches to care taken by the resilient LGBTQIA+ community.
The project explores how care and knowledge are shared – past and present – to support LGBTQIA+ people’s rights and wellbeing. The Film Library features a curated selection of video works and ephemera exploring queer care, including materials from Edinburgh Action for Trans Health and AIDS activism. Free monthly events offer the opportunity to make friends and share films, walks, conversations and meals.
The Queer Care Caravan workshops are facilitated by LGBTQIA+ artists Cannach MacBride, Conal McStravck, and Mikki who have curated queer and trans care media and community care resources with cooperation from from Lothian Health Services Archive, Edinburgh, Tyne and Wear Archives and UK trans mutual aid groups and transnational LGBTQIA support groups, past and present.
Saturday 17 January 2026 • Community Care Workshop • Find out more
Saturday 21 February 2026 • Self Care Workshop • Find out more
Positive Men
Words and images from these scenes resonate throughout the documentary portraits which follow. The interviews, conducted in Toronto and San Francisco (1993-1994), feature artists, filmmakers, AIDS community workers, writers and volunteers who have made unique contributions within the cultural and community responses to AIDS. Included in this series of portraits are visual artists Andy Fabo and Stephen Andrews, video artist Zachery Longboy, performance poet Courtnay McFarlane, Beowulf Thorne – editor of Diseased Pariah Newsletter, safe sex author Richard Locke, and Dan Wolfieler – director of the San Francisco Stop AIDS Project.
Positive Men concludes with a moving portrait of the late filmmaker, Marlon Riggs.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
In the early 1990s, Lloyd Wong began to make a work based on his experiences living with AIDS in Toronto, but he died from AIDS-related illnesses before completing it. For three decades, his work-in-progress was considered “long-lost” until it resurfaced at The ArQuives. In this experimental documentary, Lesley Loksi Chan combines Lloyd Wong’s footage with fragments of her research notes to reflect on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and to attempt to understand someone through multiple takes. Rough and unprocessed, this film explores the meaning of incompletion.
Q-LoXXX
The project connects Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with queer resistance experiences and theory, breaking through static subjectivities and fixed identities. We channel the lives, efforts, and achievements of those before us, carrying our queer ghosts with us into a utopia of our own collective imagination and creation: Q-LoXXX. Through this process of speculation and fictionalization, we reclaim figures, spaces, memories and beings, to highlight them as ideals and values of our shared experience.
This project was developed through a collaborative process with queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants from the extended community of Papaya Kuir. I co-facilitated a series of writing and performance workshops that employed character building, role play, fabulation, and collage to collectively create the myth. I then synthesized this work, transforming the raw material into a structured script of eight scenes. To materialize the universe of Q-LoXXX, I crafted props from papier-mâché and found objects and painted the scenography, giving form to our transformative space for the community, of which I am part of, to experientially live its utopia and document its own methods of world-making.
*find further information on this project in the following links:
https://nataliasorzano.com/can…
https://nataliasorzano.com/can…
This work is a co-creation and participative project done in collaborations with Papaya Kuir, -an activist organization working with immigrant Latinx queer communities in the Netherlands-, and its extended community.