Cinema on the Border: The 20th Annual Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival

Berwick-upon-Tweed is a seaside town located on the border between England and Scotland. Such porous identity is reflected in the town’s only film festival, the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, which every year draws an eclectic group of filmmakers, programmers, critics, scholars, and cinephiles for a three-day foray into the in-between spaces of cinema. 

Throughout its history, Berwick has changed hands over a dozen times, and even spent a brief stint in 1551 as a free town independent of either kingdom. Officially, as a sign reminds newcomers at the train station, Berwick-upon-Tweed “belongs” to England now (even if its football team plays in the Scottish league). But once in Berwick, there’s not much to indicate which side of the border you’re on. You can have fish ‘n’ chips one day, and haggis the next. As a town whose hyphenated three-part name also suggests in-between-ness, Berwick-upon-Tweed is an opportune setting for a film festival that offers a much-needed place for inclusion, unbeholden to national affiliations and externally imposed divisions. 

What, if anything, can this border town offer to today’s film and media landscape? What new ways of thinking can flourish in such a place?

This year’s edition offered an especially rich program, with several eye-opening sections. “New Cinema Award Winners” showcased features and shorts “pushing against genre, form, and convention”, per the festival’s program notes. “Propositions” instead offered a “discursive setting for filmmakers to expand on their work,” and included new projects by Morgan Quaintance, in collaboration with sociologist Laura Harris, as well as videos from artist and AIDS activist Stuart Marshall presented by Conal McStravick and a live video essay titled Black & Arab Encounters on Screen by Abiba Coulibaly. “Essential Cinema” centred on a retrospective on the collaborative videos made by Marion Scemama and David Wojnarowicz in the 1980s, and unveiled two new film restorations, Robina Rose’s Nightshift (UK, 1981) and Ossama Mohammed’s Stars in Broad Daylight (Syria, 1988). “Filmmakers in Focus,” in turn, homed in on the analogue films made by Brooklyn-based artist Ayanna Dozier and the first films screened outside Asia from Japanese Eri Makihara. Curated by Philip Rizk, “Focus: Ways of Seeing Fanon” screened works from the Middle East and Africa, while the “New Cinema Forum” organised roundtables and conversations around sustaining creative practices and communities. Finally, the festival also organised a few free exhibitions, including Wendy Clark’s Endless Love Tapes, which came with a pop-up production site where people could record their own three-minute love tapes that were then unveiled on the festival’s final day as a playful and collaborative Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests-inspired video project. With festival passes starting at 20 quid and individual tickets sold for as little as five, BFMAF is an accessible and welcoming festival that thrives off the support of a large group of local volunteers (majority of which are women!). 

Lumumba: Death of a Prophet

The notion of entanglement was one of the edition’s unofficial themes. Entanglement between creator and subject matter, between past and present, between theory and practice, between collaborators and disciplines. Morgan Quaintance and Laura Harris presented Available Light (2025), a film shot in Japan which both authors stressed was “not a collaboration”, at least not in the way one would expect. The filmmakers worked in parallel at the site creating two autonomous bodies of work in their own disciplines: Quaintance in the form of an experimental 16mm film, Harris in the form of photography and ethnography. At the screening, Harris read from her text (printed copies of which she also handed out to attendees) before and after the film, referring to theirs as a “relational practice”: two people working at the same time and in the same place, but not necessarily with the same methods, tools, or results.

Entanglement of archives and histories. In a conversation with Mai Taha and Philip Rizk as part of Rizk’s program “Ways of Seeing Fanon”, curator, writer, and independent researcher Orsod Malik asked how programming might entangle the archives and histories of one place with those of another. Raoul Peck’s magnificent film Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (2000) tells the story of the US-led assassination of Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since its independence from Belgium and leader of the Congolese National Movement from 1958 until his assassination in 1961. The story behind Lumumba’s murder recently resurfaced in the Oscar-nominated Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024). Unlike Soundtrack, which focuses on the vibrant musical context in which the assassination took place, resulting in a fast-paced film which makes you move as you weep, Peck’s Lumumba slowly interweaves the story of the revolutionary figure with the filmmaker’s own voice, as he (Peck) wonders how to tell this story to future generations, and what that might mean for audiences today. The director punctuates archival shots of Lumumba with documentary footage of people of different ages walking down the streets of Brussels, disconnected from the Congo, from their own country’s complicity in those past horrors, and from one another. How to get these people over here to care about those people over there? It’s the same question that was previously articulated by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville in Ici et ailleurs (Here and Elsewhere, 1976), in which the “ici” (here) was/is Europe, and the “ailleurs” (there) was/is Palestine. 

Another eloquent example of such cross-pollinations in the program was The Terror and the Time (1978), directed by Rupert Roopnarine and the Victor Jara Collective, formed at Cornell University in the mid-’70s and named after the revolutionary Chilean poet, folksinger, and activist who was arrested, tortured, and killed by the Chilean military shortly after the US-backed coup led by military dictator Augusto Pinochet on the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. The Terror and the Time looks at the 1953 British invasion of Guyana; in a style reminiscent of La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968), similarly divided into three parts to make it easier for audiences to appreciate the film’s lessons, The Terror addresses the colonial invasion within the much wider context of imperialist violence that was taking place across the world that same year. It also connects the onslaught with the words of Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter, whose verses, which the film intersperses throughout, suggest a man emotionally connected to other working people in other parts of the world. 

Roadworks

Or we can look at Abiba Coulibaly’s live video essay Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, which brings together different manifestations of Black and Arab onscreen entanglements, “and all those who fall somewhere in-between the false dichotomy.” The performance begins with Coulibaly positioning herself as both Black and Arab and ends with Roadworks, a short film performance by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. During Hatoum’s film, Coulibaly keeps quiet as Hatoum very slowly drags her bare feet – themselves entangled with heavy UK police-style black boots – across a lively street in the historically working-class neighbourhood of Brixton. Sometimes images need no commentary, and this is one such case. 

Entanglement of time and scale. In Luciana Decker Orozco’s Puro andar (Language of the Entrails, 2025), inspired by the Peruvian writer Gamaliel Churata’s novel El Pez de Oro (The Golden Fish, 1957) and the book’s mix of Andean myths and avant-garde narratives, Decker offers an audiovisual exploration of her entrails provoked by an indigestion caused by the wildly different diet the director surrendered to while living far from home. The growling underworld sounds of an unhappy stomach work as a counterpoint to the film’s first sequence, in which content mouths are seen eating traditional Bolivian delicacies like habas (hava beans) and choclo (corn) around a family table, perhaps my favourite opening shot of the whole festival. 

Puro andar (Language of the Entrails)

There was also a focus on analogue filmmaking. Films shot on 16mm and Super 8mm made the bulk of the “New Cinema Award Winners” sidebar, and also featured prominently in the section devoted to the works of Morgan Quaintance,  whose films are consistently shot with his Bolex 16mm camera, as well as the retrospective focus on Ayanna Dozier, whose films, processed and scanned in NYC’s DIY organisation Mono No Aware, exude a gritty city flavour. In a post-screening talk, Dozier stressed the site-specific quality of her films, which capture a city that is disappearing and where gentrified public spaces are losing their ability to affirm the sexuality of young folks. In her defence of analogue film (“I’m obsessed with the frame”) and her resistance to digital cinema (“I don’t need to see the world in HD”), Dozier shoots NYC the way it used to be in the pre-Giuliani, pre-digital era, and suggests that the metropolis could still be that way if we want it to be. 

Another analogue treat from the Essential Cinema program was Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981), gorgeously shot by Jon Jost on 16mm, a film which unfolds over a single evening, as guests check in and out of London’s legendary punk stayover Portobello Hotel. Sadly, Rose was supposed to present the film but passed away a couple of months before the festival. Charlotte Procter, an archivist, curator, collection and archive director at LUX and a member of the Cinenova Working Group, offered a generous introduction in her place, detailing how and why this film was restored. Like New York, London is another well-known example of a city that has drastically changed due to gentrification and bourgeois-fication. While in the 80s the Portobello Hotel lodged both glamorous older women and poor young punks (as the film shows), today it’s an exclusive luxury boutique hotel in the gentrified neighbourhood of Notting Hill. Works like Nightwalker (Dozier, 2022) and Nightshift suggest another kind of cinema, which is to say another kind of city, one in which the public space is still a stage for beautiful and ethereal gestures of intimacy. 

Nightshift

Ayanna Dozier’s concerns about the difficulties young people face while trying to affirm their sexuality in the city space today – in the context of rising living costs, gentrification, and so-called redevelopment projects – raise broader questions about the fate of events like BFMAF as well. What spaces, if any, allow us to affirm our “cinesexuality”, to borrow from scholar Patricia MacCormack, our cinephilia, our collective love for cinema, or what Susan Sontag once called “cine-love”? 

While previous BFMAF editions took place entirely at The Maltings, a beautiful movie theatre built in 1990 on the ruins of an early 19th-century malt house that burned down in 1984, this year’s edition divided the screenings between its historical venue and a new makeshift cinema called Maltings Barracks. Earlier this year it was announced that The Maltings will undergo a multi-million redevelopment project, a proposal that has been met with both support and objections from the local community, afraid of how this new space (which will include a main theatre space and two smaller cinemas) will affect their town. As the building is redeveloped, the BFMAF will temporarily lose its home. What will happen to The Maltings and the BFMF? How will these changes impact the festival? 

Somehow I am confident that if any place can think outside the box, it’s Berwick-upon-Tweed, a border town that has had to reimagine itself quite a few times in history and wrestle with the entanglements of (un)belonging. In a time when many festivals are struggling with all kinds of uncertainties  – and when many filmmakers, programmers, critics, and festival goers are generally worried about the medium’s future as well as their own livelihoods and ability to continue to work – BFMAF offers a place to think about cinema as an artform that exists in between: in between features and shorts, digital and analogue, old, new, and newly restored films; in between documentary and fiction, narrative and experimental works; in between learning and sitting with the unknown; in between cinema and other arts, cinema and the gallery space, traditional theatres and alternative venues… In retrospect, the festival’s openness to the myriad shapes the moving image can take on is perhaps its most border-thinking quality. 

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival
27 – 30 March 2025
https://bfmaf.org/