INTERVIEW: Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

Image: Listen by Eri Makihara

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) celebrates its 20th anniversary this spring with four days of transformative cinema, exhibitions, and dynamic conversations, all taking place across England’s most northerly town. With the help of some funding from Arts Council England, North East Combined Authority, the National Lottery and Northumberland County Council, the festival is committed to dynamic curatorial practice while steadfastly grounded in its values and intentions.

Festival Director Peter Taylor has spoken in glowing terms of the festival. “Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is a perpetual work in progress rejecting labels that might restrict how we see, understand, and experience cinema. Instead, we embrace pluralist ideas and fluid modes of production and presentation, culminating in a kaleidoscopic, transformative programme of film and conversation, instruments of liberation.”

For its twentieth iteration, Japanese filmmaker Eri Makihara will be the first Filmmaker in Focus – and this marks the first time Makihara’s films will be exhibited outside of Asia. Makihara’s work is based on film and installation and focuses on the physical sensations of people communicating primarily through sign language. The work seeks to bring to light the social structure of our world and its inherent oppressive mechanisms. Elsewhere, artist and researcher Conal McStravick curates a rare screening of Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) on the subject of AIDS by video artist and gay rights activist Stuart Marshall, previously presumed lost and unseen for almost forty years.

On the other end of the spectrum, also showing is a newly commissioned work by London-based artist and writer Morgan Quaintance. Partnered with sociologist Laura Harris in Tokyo, Quaintance’s Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society through interviews with workers at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, as well as fragments of conversations with renters in both Tokyo and London. Black And Arab Encounters On Screen is a hybrid talk and live video essay by Abiba Coulibaly exploring parallels, strains, convergences and ruptures in on-screen encounters between Black and Arab characters, and the off-screen realities from which they emerged.

We embrace pluralist ideas and fluid modes of production and presentation, culminating in a kaleidoscopic, transformative programme of film and conversation

The New Cinema Awards will include new works by numerous contemporary boundary-pushing filmmakers and artists, including When The Phone Rang by Iva Radivojevic, which investigates dislocation and the nature of remembering in the context of 1990s Yugoslavia through the eyes of an eleven year old girl. Memory is also central to Hope Strickland’s A River Holds A Perfect Memory, a multilayered work tracing diasporic memory and family migration between the UK and Jamaica through archival footage, newly shot 16mm film, and LIDAR scans. Invention, directed by Courtney Stephens, is a remarkable microbudget drama exploring the process of grieving a complicated parent in which filmmaking itself becomes a part of the process. And finally, family expectations, class difference and psychological isolation are at the heart of Isadora Neves Marques’ My Senses Are All I Have To Offer, a subtly sci-fi film envisioning a reality where other people’s sensations can be accessed from a distance through a new technological invention, sensory pills.

While all this might sound like a lot to take in, BFMAF strives to understand the optimal exhibition conditions for artists and filmmakers’ work within the resources and contexts it has available. As an extension of this, the accessibility of audiences and communities that it is involved with, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, are of utmost consideration within the festival: it is a fully inclusive event for all.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival takes place at various venues from Thursday 27^th – Sunday 30^th March.