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A relative’s likeness surfaces as a tattoo on the arm of a Ukrainian soldier and an army base in Oklahoma, built to fight Kiowa and Apache, is rededicated to aid in the fight against Putin’s Western expansion. Adam Piron explores the contradictions of colonialism and anti-settler solidarity across time, geography and the muddled spaces of TikTok, where representations of Indigenous peoples are caught up in the chaotic circulation of images.
A hypnosis-inducing pan-geographic shuttle built on brainwave-generating binaural beats, Deep Sleep takes us on a journey through the sound waves of Gaza and competing sights of modern ruin. Precipitated by the artist’s restricted travel to Palestine, the work is an invitation to move between the corporeal self and the cinema space – transcending the limits of borders and the fallibility of memory.
An experimental horror film based on a series of paranormal events that took place in the early ’70s in Hexham, Northern England. In this modern-day folk tale, two brothers become terrorised by ghostly visions after bringing a pair of stone heads into their family home. Combining photographic documentation with personal archive material and dreamlike sequences, Hexham Heads reflects on the haunted nature of family photographs and domestic objects as vessels of trauma.
Reality or Not narrates the intriguing tale of a group of high school students nestled in the northern suburbs of Paris. They embark on a daring experiment, one that seeks to seize control of the reality enveloping them and reshape it according to their own vision. The project marks the latest milestone in the extensive research journey undertaken by the artist Cécile B. Evans, spanning the entirety of their career.
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!
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.
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A twentysomething in Argentina loses his warehouse job. Boys in Maputo, Mozambique, perform half-hearted sex acts in front of a webcam, and a woman in the Philippines assembles electronics in a small factory. The Human Surge is hybrid cinema at its most playful and electrifying – a docufictional exploration of labour and the global digital economy, and an almost spiritual reflection on our collective relationship to the multiple realities produced by imaging technologies.
Maria Fusco is a working-class writer who grew up during the Troubles in Belfast. This Propositions event clashes together two BBC TV plays and an artist’s film to explore the ongoing legacies of censorship, voice and socio-cultural velocity with particular reference to the BBC’s broadcasting ban of 1988 to 1994 of Northern Irish (largely Nationalist) politicians.
The event title is a quote from Reginald Maudling, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1970-72
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Drop in between 12:00 – 17:00 and respond to material in The Burr’s film library selected by artist Kate Liston. Use prompts devised to uncover new meaning in films and artefacts relating to the region’s historic archives of mining, and strategies Kate uses in her new film project Sinkhole.
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Two films set in liminal spaces of exile. In the wake of dispossession, when dreams are deferred and memories bring pain, small acts of collective speaking generate new threads of resistance, liberation, and hope.
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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.
barrunto is a feature length speculative fiction taking place in a future of the past, in a present, ruptured now. It is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus. Through digital, archival and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto sensorially translates bodily unrest, forecasts, or omens via signals sensed in the environment.
Basma al-Sharif’s first feature film is an experimental homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope against hopelessness. Departing from the ancient symbol of the ouroboros – a snake eating its own tail – the film follows a man moving through different landscapes in search of a past lover. A multilingual journey through time and space reflecting on recurrent patterns of destruction and regeneration, representation and erasure.
An informal conversation for critics, writers, and anyone interested in the sustainability of arts writing and publishing in various contexts. We invite Lesley Guy, Kate Liston (Corridor8) and Lyn Hagan (The Journal of Discarded Daydreams) to an open conversation considering how we respond to/reflect on the arts, and how the contexts that stifle might exist in tension with the contexts that nourish. What are the material and conceptual frameworks for sustainable arts publishing – and are these applicable to other mediums, forms and contexts?
A fog clears, revealing new forms of camouflage. From endless desert to outer space, cameras and landscapes reflect each other as vessels for ambiguous and volatile imaginaries playing out beyond our control.
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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.
An intimate, multifaceted portrait of the Krahô people indigenous to northeastern Brazil. Made in close collaboration with the community, The Buriti Flower sketches the rhythms, dreams and ways of being connecting families working to protect their land from the cyclical violence of encroaching settlements. Blending observational documentary and staged scenes, it depicts the flow of life on a continuum of ever-replenishing strength and resistance.
Join us for an after-hours set from the co-founder of the Beirut Groove Collective, and host of monthly NTS radio show Beirut Daze. Ernesto Chahoud is internationally renowned DJ, compiler and music researcher from Beirut who aims to bring the rarest and sometimes strangest records to people’s ears.
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Meet Mamántula, the boy of everyone’s dreams… and a giant, cross-dressing spider-human with an appetite for revenge and sperm. In an alternate Berlin of brutalist saunas, sepulchral subway corridors and hardboiled detectives, he threads a silken trap. His dream: to cocoon the planet, victim by victim, in his sticky embrace. Will a couple of lovebirds with police badges stop him? Or will the gay community have to step in and take the law into their own hands?