Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is the UK’s Festival for new cinema and artists’ moving image. BFMAF is committed to the mutual development of artists, audiences, critics, filmmakers, and programmers. They make the festival possible.
It takes place in England's most Northerly town, Berwick-Upon-Tweed.
BFMAF is a platform for new and established artists and filmmakers to push boundaries and explore the unexplored.
As if to answer the question ‘what can moving images be and do in this disquieting moment?’, BFMAF suggests they can be time machines, maps, love letters, poems, ghosts, fever dreams, missives, manifestos. They can also explode.
— Elena Gorfinkel, Art Monthly 2018
Film entries are predominantly considered for the New Cinema Awards but may also be considered for other Festival strands.
New Cinema Awards
The New Cinema Awards are a celebration of the most distinctive works of new cinema being made around the world today. Alive to this moment, they transcend boundaries of genre, form, and convention. Since ending jury and competition selection in 2020, BFMAF offers a unique spotlight on feature length and short films. Each film receives a £400 cash award.
Past winners:
2024, All selected filmmakers shared the award:
Razan AlSalah, Alee Peoples, Aurélien Froment, Nelson Yeo, Sirah Foighel Brutmann & Eitan Efrat, Eva Giolo, Rebecca Jane Arthur, Katja Mater, Maaike Neuville, Shambhavi Kaul, Gala Hernández López, Ion de Sosa, Ali Cherri, Boren Chhith, Kamal Aljafari, Ricardo Alves Jr., Fabrizio Terranova, Asmaa Jama & Gouled Ahmed, Farah Al Qasimi, Rouzbrh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Margaret Salmon & Maria Fusco, João Salaviza & Renée Nader Messora, Tana Gilbert, Felipe Casanova, Valentin Noujaïm, Philip Widmann
2023, All selected filmmakers shared the award:
Luis Arnías, Marwa Arsanios, Meriem Bennani, Jenny Brady, Jamie Crewe, Eitan Efrat & Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Éiméar McClay & Cat McClay, Soda Jerk, Huw Lemmey & Onyeka Igwe, Holly Márie Parnell, Angelo Madsen Minax, Basim Magdy, Lucrecia Martel, Fox Maxy, Sophio Medoidze, Manuel Muñoz Rivas, Sorayos Prapapan,Anhar Salem, Deborah Stratman, Rea Tajiri, Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka, Cláudia Varejão, Ariadine Zampaulo.
2021, All selected filmmakers shared the award:
Sophia Al-Maria, Ane Hjort Guttu, Salad Hilowle, Adam Lewis Jacob, Tim Leyendekker, Jordan Lord, Fox Maxy, Iméar McClay, Cat McClay, Abdessamad El Montassir, Carlos Maria Romero, Suneil Sanzgiri, Fern Silva, Camara Taylor, Amalia Ulman, Rehana Zaman.
2020, All selected filmmakers shared the award.
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Maria Anastassiou, Yu Araki, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Luis Lopez Carrasco, Rhea Dillon, Jessica Dunn Rovinelli, Mouaad el Salem, Maria Clara Escobar, Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, Luke Fowler, Sky Hopinka, Nelson Makengo, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Phạm Ngọc Lân, Stefan Ramirez Perez, Lisa Spilliaert.
2019, Onyeka Igwe, the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered, UK, 2019
2018, Callum Hill, Crowtrap, UK, 2018
2017, Sky Hopinka, Dislocation Blues, US, 2017
2016, Camilo Restrepo, Cilaos, France, 2015
Festival Strands Include:
Exhibitions
BFMAF exhibits single-channel installation works in multiple venues across Berwick for the duration of the festival. We encourage artists to enter single-screen versions of multi-screen works for consideration. At present we don’t have the resources to exhibit multi-channel work.
Propositions
A discursive setting for filmmakers to expand on their work, elaborating research, contexts and perspectives as a means to dig deeper into the questions, ideas and complications encountered through the filmmaking process.
Essential Cinema
A pluralist retrospective strand, Essential Cinema proposes revisions and additions to what might be considered canonical cinema. Our 2024 edition included UK premieres of new restorations of Phantom Beirut, A Stolen Meeting, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, Bedwin Hacker, and a World Festival Premiere of Bye Bye Love.
Filmmaker in Focus
Timely encounters with artists and filmmakers’ singular bodies of work. Berwick Film & Media Arts’ Festival’s 2024 Filmmakers in Focus were Basma al-Sharif (Palestine) and Eduardo Williams (Argentina). In previous years the Festival has featured profiles of filmmakers including Nguyễn Trinh Thi (Vietnam), Rajee Samarasinghe (Sri Lanka), Izza Génini (Morocco), Payal Kapadia (India), Angelo Madsen Minax (USA), Ayo Akingbade (UK), Marwa Arsanios (Berlin/Lebanon), Kira Muratova (Ukraine), Shireen Seno & John Torres(Philippines), Ali Khamraev (Uzbekistan), Peggy Ahwesh (USA) and Sophia Al-Maria (Qatar/USA).