Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival turns 20
It’s a landmark year for the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, as the artistically ambitious festival of film and artists’ moving image looks forward to its upcoming 20th edition. Ahead of the festival, which runs 27–30 March, SCAN selects some highlights from the programme, featuring diverse works with “shared and overlapping interests in asking what new cinema might be.”
New Cinema Forum
12pm, Thursday 27 March
This new initiative offers a relaxed space for artists, filmmakers, critics and arts/film workers to reflect and make connections ahead of the Opening Night film. A series of sessions offer practical ways to sustain and develop film and moving image practice and community, exploring topics including working with archives, research-based practice and contexts for production.
Opening Film: Your Touch Makes Others Invisible
7:30pm, Thursday 27 March
2021’s BFMAF Filmmaker in Focus Rajee Samarasinghe returns to open the 2025 festival with his debut feature, a story of missing people in post-civil war Sri Lanka made collaboratively – and secretly – with impacted Tamil communities.
Black & Arab Encounters on Screen
2:30pm, Friday 28 March
Incorporating rarely-seen and archival footage, this live video essay by Abiba Coulibaly links on-screen meetings of Black and Arab characters with their off-screen realities, in order to examine filmic manifestations of intercontinental solidarity and its limitations.
Reimagining Place
10am, Saturday 29 March
This programme shares two participatory art projects from the North East of England, which saw young people working alongside filmmakers to uncover histories in their local areas – resulting in a documentary about teenage life in the Northumberland town of Wooler, and a short film reimagining Byker as the Wild West.
Morgan Quaintance: Available Light
2pm, Saturday 29 March
London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance presents a subtly affecting portrait of residential precarity in Tokyo and London, utilising immersive sound design and impressionistic images. The screening will be complemented by a reading by sociologist Laura Harris, and bookended by two shorter films by Quaintance which are currently in post-production.
Marion Scemama & David Wojnarowicz: Collaboration, Friendship and Fury
7:30pm, Saturday 29 March
The close friendship and artistic partnership between artists Marion Scemema and David Wojnarowicz is celebrated in this programme of shorts, which includes a newly restored cut of Scemema’s Relax Be Cruel, a seminal document of the Pier 34 alternative art space in 1980s New York.
nobody’s word • Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya • A Thousand Waves Away • Language of the Entrails
12:15pm, Sunday 30 March
The New Cinema Awards programme is a central strand of BFMAF, celebrating the most distinctive works of new cinema from around the world. Our pick of the strand is this programme of short films by international filmmakers Puro Andar, Malena Szlam and Helena Wittmann (pictured), as well as Scotland-based artist Camara Taylor.
Some Strings
Throughout the festival, 27–30 March
As well as attending the programme of screenings, talks and socials, BFMAF visitors can also take in a number of exhibitions running throughout the festival. This year’s selection includes Some Strings, a growing collection of over 100 filmic responses to If I Must Die, a poem by Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer who was targeted by Israeli strikes along with seven members of his family.
The Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival takes place in various venues across Berwick, 27–30 March. Explore the full programme and book tickets at bfmaf.org.
Header image credit: Amelia Read