Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival

This first look at the Festival’s programme reveals films from Basma al-Sharif, Emilia Beatriz, Nadia El Fani, Onyeka Igwe, Leida Laius, Ghassan Salhab and Heiny Srour. Spanning different decades, contexts and continents, their films grapple with generations of grief and loss. Struggles for liberation are explored with tenderness, ingenuity, humour and beauty. Holding difficulty and entangled ambivalences too, they embody and sustain disciplines of hope.

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.

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.

Festival Passes grant access to the entire festival programme of films, exhibitions, talks, and parties. Early Bird Festival Passes are now on sale, for this, the 19th edition, at the reduced price of £45. Tickets are operating at £30 under 30yo also.