Payal Kapadia
Payal Kapadia (India) is a filmmaker and artist based in Mumbai. She studied Film Direction at the Film and Television Institute of India. Her work deals with that which is not easily visible, hidden somewhere in the folds of memory and dreams. It is between minor, ephemeral feminine gestures where she tries to find the truth that makes up her practice. In 2017, her film Afternoon Clouds premiered at Cannes film Festival in the Cinefondation selection; in 2018, her experimental documentary And What is the Summer Saying had its world premiere at the Berlinale Shorts. The latter went on to receive the Special Jury Prize at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam the same year. Kapadia’s experimental short The Last Mango Before Monsoon premiered at Oberhausen International Film Festival in 2015, where she was awarded FIPRESCI Prize and Special Jury Prize. The film received other awards including Best Film and Best Editing at Mumbai International Film Festival in 2016 and Special Mention at Filmadrid. Currently, Payal is working on making her first feature film All We Imagine as Light, which she developed at the Cinefondation Cannes Residency between 2019-20 and is supported by the Hubert Bals Script and Project Development Fund.
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.