Márta Mészáros
Márta Mészáros was born in Budapest in 1931. Her father, the avant-garde sculptor László Mészáros, moved the family to Kirgizia whilst fleeing fascism where, on the outbreak of World War II, he fell victim to Stalin’s purges. Her mother also died. She was placed in a Soviet orphanage and only returned to Hungary after the war. Between 1954-56 she studied at the film academy in Moscow and until 1968 she made Romanian and Hungarian documentaries. These autobiographical motifs inspired the Diary series that garnered considerable international acclaim. She has directed feature films since 1968. From her very first full-length film, The Girl through to Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls!, Riddance, Adoption, Nine Months, and The Two of Them, Mészáros depicts—in a non-judgemental way and with puritanical unaffectedness—the process whereby something great and simple happens in the life and relations of her self-aware, seeking-rebellious female protagonists, forcing them to make decisions. These films were instant international hits. In 1975 Mészáros won a Golden Bear at the Berlinale for Adoption, awarded to both a female and Hungarian director for the very first time in the history of the Berlinale. Nine Months took an OCIC prize at the Berlinale and a FIPRESCI prize at Cannes in 1977. This opened the wayfor international co-productions, and these films by Mészáros differ from those of the ‘Budapest School’ that developed in parallel with her career. The Heiresses, made in a co-production, reveals a historical background behind remarkable love triangle relationships. Then came the Diary tetralogy, of which the first, Diary for My Children, won the Grand Prix Speciale du Jury at Cannes (1984). Mészáros, with 30 feature films and numerous documentaries to her name, also made a movie entitled Unburied Man (2004) about Imre Nagy, the leading figure of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Her latest film, Aurora Borealis (2017), recognized with several international awards, looks back to the Soviet occupation of Vienna through an unusual mother-daughter fate.
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.