Walter Saxer
Walter Saxer is a Swiss Film Producer who began his film career in the late 60’s when he met the young German director Werner Herzog. With no prior experience, Saxer helped with the production of Herzog’s second feature Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and became enraptured by the challenge of visualising the “impossible”. He moved to Germany where he quickly became acquainted with artists who were part of the German New Cinema wave including Herbert Achternbusch, Reiner Fassbinder and of course Werner Herzog, with whom he collaborated for most of his career. Saxer eventually took a leading role in the production of iconic films like Aguirre The Wrath Of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). It was during the making of Fitzcarraldo that he got to know the penal colony “Sepa Nuestro Señor de los Milagros” – a mandatory checkpoint before traveling to the Camisea location in Central Peru, where the steamboat of Fitzcarraldo was hauled over the mountain. After completion of the film Saxer returned to the Amazon to document the surreal place that had captured his heart and imagination. In the mid 90’s, he decided to make the Peruvian Amazon his home and today lives in the city of Iquitos where he manages a small hotel “La Casa Fitzcarraldo ” hidden in a luscious garden – a product of his relentless fight against the ongoing deforestation that is destroying the jungles.
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.
Run Time
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.