Independent cinema is under threat. Edinburgh’s Filmhouse and Aberdeen’s Belmont Cinema have been forced to close their doors, and the cost of living crisis is affecting funding for all creative industries.
In the midst of all this gloom, however, an annual celebration of new cinema and artists’ films is taking place next month. The three day 18th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival opens on Friday 3 March, and offers a packed and varied programme of new work, retrospectives, discussions, performances and exhibitions – plus two club nights, just for fun.
Festival Director Peter Taylor said: “We could not be more excited to welcome audiences back to our fully in-person festival this year. As our new Spring festival dates promise, the festival has a new energy and a new lease of life and one which is reflected in a programme of screenings and events which is just as eclectic and exciting as ever. Across the town, we look forward to collectively sharing these new and retrospective works with cinema-lovers as well as offering up more than a few surprises along the way.”
The festival will focus on five themes: New Cinema Awards. Essential Cinema, Propositions, Filmmakers in Focus, and Screentime.
The work of 23 New Cinema Award winners – selected from 918 films submitted via an open call – pushes against boundaries of genre, form and convention. In Last Things by Deborah Stratman, based on two short stories by J.-H. Rosny, science meets speculative fiction in a reflection on evolution and extinction. Sophia Medoidze’s Let us flow uses innovative audio-visual techniques; set in the mountainous region of Tusheti in NE Georgia, it considers the importance of ritual, the maintenance of community ties and the way in which modernisation and migration are transforming rural landscapes.
And in Ungentle by Huw Lemmey and Onyeka Igwe John le Carré meets Derek Jarman in a subtle reflection on the complex relationships between the development of British espionage and male homosexuality. Voiced by Ben Whishaw, the film draws on the life stories of famous historic operatives, from Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess to Noel Coward and Hardy Amies, to explore the tensions between loyalty and lust that ran parallel in the lives of spies and gay men.
Essential Cinema is a pluralist retrospective series, proposing revisions and additions to what might be considered canonical cinema; it includes Jon Moritsugu’s Asian freak-out magnum opus Terminal USA – ‘a maximally irreverent slice of early 90s punk culture’, and Helena Solberg’s debut short films The Interview and Noon, alongside her feature film From the Ashes: Nicaragua Today, which brings a multi-layered feminist perspective to a political and societal portrait of post-1979 Nicaragua.
Filmmakers in Focus will present the first UK retrospective of acclaimed film-making duo Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui whose narrative and documentary features centre people, stories and perspectives indigenous to the Arctic Circle, particularly the Nenets, Lapsui’s own nomadic tribe, living for centuries in regions of the Extreme North.
Anerca, Breath of Life by Lehmuskallio and his son Johannes centres on performance and the importance of song. Shot over several decades, the film speaks against the continued infractions of the rights of the indigenous people of the Arctic Circle while also expressing the joy, pain and energy of these individuals and communities through performance, conversation and cinema. The landmark film 7 Songs from the Tundra, the first film made in the Nenet’s language, is an anthology of seven vignettes demonstrating the clash of cultures between the Nenets and Soviet-Russians.
And in Propositions filmmakers and critics will offer, in the discursive setting of a screening, discussion or performance, first hand perspectives expanding their work and contextualising aspects of their research and practice. This will include In Focus, a conversation with Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui, Code Names, an in-person screening performance by Iranian artist Maryam Tafakory, and The Pleasures of Unbelonging, in which Christopher Ulutupu, an artist of Samoan/Niuean/German descent, creates new narrative forms through a ‘richly pop, queer and celebratory Pacific lens’.
Screentime is filmmaking and cinema programming with and for young people. This will feature two short films produced by Berwick Young Filmmakers and the premiere of Bridge to the Future, a collaboration made as part of a wider community project around the conservation of the Union Chain Bridge, which spans the border between Scotland and England.
And that’s not all! Four exhibitions will run 10am-5pm daily. culture (cultuur) by Fairuz Ghammam explores aspects of (auto)biography, shared authorship and collaborative practices, staged as a walk through Ghammam’s home town of Kortrijk. Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso, XXXI, 108 repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and transforms it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Christopher Ulutupu’s Hidden Among Clouds draws on Ulutupu’s experiences of growing up in a large Samoan family in the mainly Pakeha populated region of Nelson to imagine stories of Samoan mythology and question the moral virtues they uphold, while Yu Araki’s tempo is a quiet, atmospheric portrait of an elderly store owner in the small town of Yagi, Kyoto Prefecture.
Finally, after all that sitting down, you’ll need some exercise. On Friday and Saturday nights you can dance the night away at Festival Club, where DJs Miss Mobile Disco and Noodle invite you to ‘get up, get down and get on out to party’ at Magdalene Fields Golf Club from 10pm.
Events will take place all over Berwick-upon-Tweed. The festival hub will be The Maltings overlooking the 17th century Berwick Bridge and the river Tweed; other festival venues include the Magdalene Fields Golf Club, the Town Hall Council Chamber, The Magazine, The Gymnasium, Berwick Visitors Centre and even a former shop on Marygate.
Berwick is just over an hour’s drive from Edinburgh. It can also be reached by bus (Borders Buses service 253) or by LNER trains. The festival encourages the use of public transport or car-sharing wherever possible.
Full details of the festival, ticket prices, venues and accessibility can be found on the festival’s website here. If you are over 18 you can also volunteer to help at the festival – closing date for this is 24 February.
