Rajee Samarasinghe
Rajee Samarasinghe is a filmmaker born and raised amidst the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. He received his BFA from UC San Diego and his MFA from CalArts. Much of his work examines sociopolitical conditions in Sri Lanka through the scope of deconstructing ethnographic practices and the colonial gaze in contemporary media. His practice was born out of a desire to understand the circumstances around his childhood and often navigates the terrain of memory, migration, and impermanence.
Samarasinghe recently completed his debut feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, which explores post-civil war Sri Lanka. The project has received support from the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station, Field of Vision, and True/False Film Festival’s PRISM program, and is set to have its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2020, Samarasinghe was also awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2023 and a Yaddo Residency in 2024. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA – Modern Mondays), the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum (2220 Arts), among others.
Samarasinghe’s films have been exhibited at venues internationally including the Tiger Short Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New Directors/New Films by MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, BFI London Film Festival, FIDMarseille, Festival du nouveau cinéma, Oberhausen, Slamdance, SFFILM Festival, Melbourne IFF, Vancouver IFF, Guanajuato IFF, BlackStar, etc. He’s received the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, the Tíos Award for Best International Film at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Film House Award for Visionary Filmmaking at the Athens International Film + Video Festival, and the Best Video Art & Experimental Award at the Tirana Film Festival among others.
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.