Anastasia Lapsui
Anastasia Lapsui (Nenets) is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and radio journalist born into a nomadic family in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in 1944, northwest of Siberia. She has developed a highly original documentary and narrative filmmaking practice in collaboration with her partner, Markku Lehmuskallio. Together, they have produced elegant portraits of the Nenets, Sami, and other Indigenous peoples, incorporating traditional folktales and spiritual customs with meticulous depictions of their everyday lives. She studied at the Salekhard Pedagogical Institute (1963-1966) and Ural State University, becoming the first Indigenous radio journalist in Yamal. Her films have been widely exhibited at festivals and museums around the world, including the Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Docpoint Helsinki, Toronto International Film Festival, Dok Leipzig, Midnight Sun Film Festival, and Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Finland’s top film prize, the Jussi Award, for Best Film (2000), Best Screenplay (2001) and Best Documentary Film (2003); Grand Prize from Festival International de Films de Femmes (2010); a Confédération Internationale des Cinémas d’Art et Essai Award from Berlinale Forum (2002); and the Finland Award (2009).
One of Eadweard Muybridge’s earliest contributions to the photographic image were stereographs commissioned by the U.S. Army, capturing their war against the Modoc Tribe in Northern California. These stereographs, many of which were staged, are revisited here through violent collisions of image and sound – generating entangled histories of visual technology, genocide and expropriation of Indigenous populations.
‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’ ~Wendy Clarke
Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them.
just above the tear duct on each side
A critical look at the evolution of Irish psychiatric institutions across the 20th century, examining the confluence of carceral, therapeutic and socioeconomic incentives that determined their influence.
Over 100 filmmakers and artists from around the world have formed Some Strings, an ensemble of unreleased filmic gestures rooted in Palestine, where poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
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.
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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.