BERWICK-UPON-TWEED.- Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival have shared that the 2024 Festival will take place over the long weekend of Thursday 7 to Sunday 10 March 2024. The 19th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival draws upon ideas of liberation and freedom in our global context, featuring premieres from Basma al-Sharif, Emilia Beatriz, Ghassan Salhab, Heiny Srour, Leida Laius and Onyeka Igwe. Festival Passes grant access to the entire festival programme of films, exhibitions, talks, and parties.
This year’s programme centres narratives of struggle and desire for personal, collective and political liberation. We look to films capable of grappling with complex entanglements, expressing disciplines of hope that may draw us closer together.
This year’s Filmmaker in focus is Basma Al-Sharif, for a strand of the festival that seeks to redress neglected histories and highlights filmmakers that haven't experienced due exposure in the UK. Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, artist/filmmaker Basma al-Sharif explores cyclical political histories and conflicts. In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works. The series of films for BFMAF, including a UK premiere, will be announced in early 2024. Al-Sharif’s major exhibitions include: the 5th edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, the Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series for the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, CCA Glasgow, the Whitney Biennial, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, and Manifesta 8, as well as screenings in the international film festivals of Locarno, Berlin, Milan, London, Toronto, New York, Montreal, and Yamagata amongst others.
The Propositions strand is a discursive setting for filmmakers to expand on their work, demonstrating research, contexts and perspectives as a means to dig deeper into the questions, ideas and complications encountered through the filmmaking process. This will include the UK premiere of barrunto (2024) by Emilia Beatriz. The 2020 Margaret Tait Commission is a feature length speculative fiction that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now. The film is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus. Through digital, archival and hand-processed 16mm film, barrunto sensorially translates bodily unrest, forecasts, or omens via signals sensed in the environment. Made in collaboration with Shanti LaLita, Claude Nouk, Alicia Matthews, Harry Josephine Giles, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, y muchxs más. Thanks to LUX Scotland, Screen Scotland and La Impresora.
Also included in the Propositions strand, Artist Onyeka Igwe will present And Let History Begin, a discursive event rehearsing new futures through radical theatre. Igwe’s recent film A Radical Duet (2023) imagines the meeting, in 1940s London, of two anti-colonialist women who channel the revolutionary fervour and ideas of the time into writing a play. Following the screening, Onyeka Igwe invites the audience to take part in a communal reading and discussion of Maskarade (1973), a play by the Caribbean theorist, playwright, novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter whose biography and theorisations were vital in the development of this film and the larger research project which proposes storytelling as essential to imagining the world otherwise.
BFMAF’s Essential Cinema programme is a pluralist retrospective series, proposing revisions and additions to what might be considered canonical cinema. Selected for 2024, are four films which follow contemporary and restored stories delving into cross-generational relationships drawn between land and identity. Phantom Beirut (1998) directed by Ghassan Salhab is set in Lebanon at the end of the 1980s, as Khalil returns home after ten years of absence. A decade earlier, during the civil war, Khalil used the cover of chaos and fire during a battle to fake his own death and acquire a new identity.
BFMAF also present a new restoration of A Stolen Meeting (1989), the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius (1923-1996), one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors, whose films frequently depicted the fate of women and children in the late Soviet era. Laius left behind a powerful body of work, and A Stolen Meeting tackles many themes that still resonate today: home, migration, rootlessness and motherhood. A Stolen Meeting has been restored by the Estonian Film Institute and Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia, on the occasion of Leida Laius’ centenary. BFMAF is pleased to share the UK Festival Premiere of the restoration, in which Valentina, recently freed from prison in Soviet Russia, heads back to her native Estonia on a quest to find her son Jüri, who she gave up for adoption years ago.
Meanwhile, in the The Hour of Liberation Director Heiny Srour and her team captured a rare record of a now mostly-forgotten war in 1960s Dhofar. Filmed in the ex-liberated zone of Dhofar/Oman, the work is a rare record of a radical moment in Arab-Islamic history; the formation of a secular, feminist, and equalitarian society. Srour’s film shows how The People’s Army liberated a third of their homeland and built the first road, hospital, waterhole, pilot farm and school in the country. Bedwin Hacker (2003), directed by Nadia El Fani is the director’s first foray into fiction. Brimming with revolutionary potential, the film is keenly critical of the security apparatus of the French state and how this is used to target immigrant communities. It follows Kalt, a female hacker who hijacks the airwaves in Northern Africa and France to broadcast political messages from a remote mountain village in Tunisia. Things quickly turn into a cat-and-mouse game between Kalt and French intelligence officer Julia as they struggle with oppositional missions.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival are also welcoming new team members for the 2024 festival.
Ane Lopez is a curator and artist based in Glasgow, joining in the role of Programming Fellow at BFMAF. She has previously worked as a film programmer for Femspectives and Glasgow Short Film Festival and she is a board member of Document Human Rights Film Festival. Ane works as the Programme Facilitator for the artist-run initiative Market Gallery and is the co-founder of A+E, a collective of artists working together towards a post-oil vision. She is also currently working on setting up an artist residency for contemporary art practitioners with a focus on ecology in the heart of the Banff Wildland in East Perthshire.
Dawn Bothwell joins as Public Programmer. Since 2009, Dawn has worked as an artist, curator, and researcher producing projects that explore site, with a particular interest in alternative regional histories. Her work has looked at the Northeast as a site for (art) production including 70-80’s experimental video and new media in Washington New Town, concrete poetry, and publishing in Sunderland in the 60’s. She also makes music solo as Pentecostal Party and with friends in Hen Ogledd, a band exploring the sub-Roman Old North. Dawn completed a PhD at C.R.U.M.B, University of Sunderland and an MRes in Exhibition Studies with Afterall Journal at Central Saint Martins. She has enjoyed working with artists who take an expanded approach to moving image including Giles Bailey, Adam Chodzko, Benedict Drew, Michelle Williams Gamaker, Laura Harrington, Rory Pilgrim and Heather Phillipson.
Miranda Mungai will take over the role of Communications Manager from December 2023. She is a freelance film curator, events producer, and facilitator. In 2023, she was on the Independent Cinema Office Advisory Group, consulting on inclusion and accessibility, a Guest Curator at IMPAKT Festival, Black History Month workshop facilitator and curator at OUTPOST Gallery, and a Curatorial Fellow at the 68th Flaherty Film Seminar. She has worked across curation, events production, communications, and editorial at film festivals and arts organisations since 2015, primarily at the London Short Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, Sheffield Documentary Festival, Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, and gal-dem.
Tom Joyes joins, creating a new visual identity for the 2024 festival. Tom is a graphic designer and art director based in Glasgow specialising in identities, publications, typography, editorial, websites and original content in collaboration with creatives. Previously art director of the biannual arts and culture magazine Elephant, Tom works with clients ranging from international magazines and cultural institutions to independent artists and retail companies, and has lectured at the Glasgow School of Art and Central Saint Martins.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is an artistically ambitious organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image based in North Northumberland on the English border with Scotland.
A work in progress, leading through collaboration, it has a resolute commitment to the mutual development of the artists, audiences, filmmakers and programmers that make the festival possible.
The Festival enacts pluralist ideas of contemporary cinema, its history and curation. Short, medium or feature-length Festival selections can include arthouse, documentary or genre cinema; artists’ moving image and sound; world premieres and freshly restored archival titles; or live, installation-based or performative works of cinema. Together, they hold shared and overlapping interests in asking what new cinema might be.
BFMAF also strives to understand and work towards optimal exhibition conditions for artists and filmmakers’ work within the resources and contexts it has available. In evaluating this, the accessibility of audiences and communities that it is involved with – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally are of utmost consideration.
