BMAF 2020 - Programme details & Filmmakers in Focus

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The 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) will take place from Thursday 17 September to Sunday 11 October 2020

The UK’s Festival for New Cinema and Artists’ Moving Image will present a new online edition, where artists’ and filmmakers’ work are expanded through conversation, new writing and podcasts over three weeks this autumn. Audiences throughout the UK and filmmakers and art professionals from across the globe are invited to enjoy a festival that embodies a pluralist and accessible cinema.

Festival Director Peter Taylor

“Recognising the radically changed and varying contexts we are all currently navigating, Berwick FIlm & Media Arts Festival will present its Festival online. Taking place over three weeks, we want audiences to explore a rich programme of films, talks and new writing in their own time. Over the last months we have needed to reimagine what Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival might be. Not just for now, but the future too. As ever, that is a work in progress and exciting to share.”

In this first announcement, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is excited to introduce its four Filmmakers in Focus:

  • Ayo Akingbade (UK) is an artist and film director based in London whose work addresses notions of urbanism, power and stance. Her films Tower XYZ (2016), Street 66 (2018) and Dear Babylon (2019) comprise the social housing trilogy entitled No News Today. The former film screened in BFMAF’s 2019 New Cinema Competition and won the inaugural Sonja Savić Award at Alternative Film/Video Festival (Belgrade). Akingbade is currently developing a feature debut.

  • Exploring diasporic identity and traditional Moroccan musical heritage, Izza Génini (France/Morocco) is a pioneering figure in Moroccan documentary and founded the distribution company SOGEVAL, producing and distributing Moroccan and African cinema. Her influential films grapple with themes such as her Moroccan-Jewish heritage, diasporic identity and the wide variety of socio-cultural contexts of music in Morocco. 

  • Indian director Payal Kapadia crafts films with a distinctly ethereal and embodied perspective, slipping between memory and dream, gesture, landscape and domestic spaces. Her consistently inventive shorts, which cross boundaries of genre and have been awarded at major festivals, stand as a strong body of work anticipating her first feature currently in development. 

  • Working with an auto-ethnographic approach, multi-disciplinary artist Angelo Madsen Minax (US) has for the past ten years been prolific at exploring queer and trans intimacies and experimenting with the many possibilities of image-making. His practice is multiple in theme and format, spanning documentary and hybrid filmmaking formats, narrative cinema, experimental and essay film. Madsen’s second feature documentary is currently in production. 

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival look forward to presenting these international filmmakers’ to its audiences, exploring their uniquely varying and exemplary filmographies.

Alongside its four Filmmakers in Focus, key festival programmes continuing online are:

  • A remodeled New Cinema Competition. All selected filmmakers will share the Berwick New Cinema Award. For the first time it includes both Short and Feature length films, encompassing the Festival’s view of some of the most distinctive and unexpected works of new cinema being made around the world today. 

  • The Propositions strandis a hybrid of discussion and online screenings that dive deep into new cinema and share discoveries encountered through artists’ and filmmakers’ research, experience and practice. 

  • Essential Cinema, is Berwick Film & Media Art Festival’s pluralist retrospective series and provides a revisionist view of what might be considered classic works of cinema.

  • Festival announcements to follow include newly-commissioned artists’ work and BFMAF’s New Cinema Competition selection. The complete 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme will be announced on Tuesday 1 September with online passes available to purchase on the same day. 

Access to the Festival will be through pay-what-you-can sliding scale passes in the UK and professional accreditation will be available worldwide.Online access to the Festival in the UK will be through Festival Passes, available on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale basis. Professional accreditation will allow access worldwide with details to follow.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is an artistically ambitious organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image.

Based in North Northumberland on the borders of England and Scotland, the Festival leads through collaboration and research. With a resolute commitment to peer support, artistic production and community development, the Film Festival is recognised for its innovative programming and critical engagement.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and a registered charity.

With the support of the BFI, awarding funds from the National Lottery, Community Foundation serving Tyne & Wear and Northumberland, Northumberland County Council, Simpsons Malt, Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council, Berwick Visual Arts and Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice.

Dates: 

Thursday, September 17, 2020 (All day) to Sunday, October 11, 2020 (All day)

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Dates: 

Thursday, September 17, 2020 (All day) to Sunday, October 11, 2020 (All day)