Now in its 20th edition, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival presents an artistically ambitious programme of new cinema and artists’ moving image.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is located in Englands most Northernly town, Berwick-Upon-Tweed, and presents an annual artistically ambitious programme of new cinema and artists’ moving image.
A platform for emerging and established artists and filmmakers, BFMAF is inspired by its surroundings to push boundaries and explore the unexplored.
The 19th edition which ran in new spring dates, between the 7th - 10th March 2024, was Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s most successful year to date with over 3,700 cinema tickets sold and 1,400 exhibition visitors. The Festival hosted an inventive programme that included 7 World premieres, 3 World festival premieres, 2 European premieres and 16 World Festival premieres.
“A work in progress”, leading through collaboration, the Festival 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 its curation; and continually works towards testing the boundaries of what a festival can be.
Loosely dedicated to emergent practices in the space where “cinema” and “artists’ moving image” intersect, BFMAF has since its inaugural 2005 edition taken as given the intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political, and refused antagonisms between fiction and non-fiction, shorts and features, old and new.
– Dylan Huw, E-Flux, 2023
'BFMAF has continued to win plaudits as a bell- wether event in the reception and re-evaluation of new and classic cinema, and experimental and artist’s moving image'
— Conal McStravick, 2022, Visual Artists Ireland
'BFMAF was like a potion that, once consumed, transformed the whole world into a cinema.'
— Christopher Small, MUBI, 2019
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
'Berwick’s bristling artistic spirit—contesting, contorting and re-shaping the traditions of the medium to tell bold new stories and challenge the status quo.'
— Ben R Nicholson - Mubi, 2018
Selected submissions for this year’s edition will be considered for the 2024 Berwick New Cinema Award as well as site-specific exhibitions in Berwick-upon-Tweed during the Festival.
The Berwick New Cinema Awards encompasses the festival’s view of the most distinctive works of new cinema being made around the world today.
All selected filmmakers receive an award rather than a single winner chosen by a jury.
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,
2018, Callum Hill, Crowtrap, UK, 2018
2017, Sky Hopinka, Dislocation Blues, US, 2017
2016, Camilo Restrepo, Cilaos, France, 2015
Past Jury members include:
Callum Hill (filmmaker); Hyun Jin Cho (programmer, London Film Festival)), Julian Ross (programmer, International Film Festival Rotterdam), Sky Hopinka (filmmaker), Sonali Joshi (film producer and distributor, Day for Night), Gail Pickering (artist), Camilo Restrepo (filmmaker). Amal Khalaf (DIrector of Programmes, Cubitt), Joanna Raczyńska (film programmer, National Gallery of Art, USA), Shama Khanna (curator, Flatness), Rehna Zaman (filmmaker), Sebastian Buerkner (filmmaker), Beatrice Gibson (filmmaker), Salomé Lamas (filmmaker) and Fatos Üstek (curator).