BFMAF 2018 Catalougue by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

We are very grateful to the ongoing support of the following organisations:

Contents

Funders:

Sponsors & Supporters

Welcome

Opening Film: Empty Metal

Closing Film: Nervous Translation

Berwick New Cinema

Propositions

Festival Partners

Exhibitions

Artist in Profile: Sophia Al-Maria

Festival Commission: Luke Fowler

Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

Screening the Forest

Essential Cinema

Festival Club

Children & Young People

Map

Festival Diary

Thanks

Venue Partners

Colophon Published as part of the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 September 2018 Published by Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival Company No.: 5622380 Registered Charity No.: 1174274 ÂŠ Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival ISBN: 978-1-9995881-0-6 All images are courtesy of the artists except 978-1-9995881-0-6 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievable system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publishers. Design and typesetting by Matthew Walkerdine | matthewwalkerdine.com Cover, illustrations and map by Emer Tumilty | emertumilty.com Printed in the UK by Martins the Printers of Berwick-upon-Tweed | martins-the-printers.com

Welcome to the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

It is my pleasure to introduce the 2018 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme. A festival lives, breathes and constantly evolves; it is born through collaboration and completed by you, our audience. Conversations—like the over the past several years with the University of Westminster’s May Adadol Ingawanij, whose colleague Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn curated the rich series ‘Screening the Forest’ in Berwick—form its roots. The forest, a naturally cinematic ecosystem, is not just a lifeless backdrop for human stories, but a protagonist in itself. ‘Screening the Forest’ is a uniquely original curatorial proposal and serves as a perfect introduction to some of Southeast Asia’s finest artist-filmmakers. Speaking of which, Philippine collective Los Otros—Shireen Seno and John Torres—are BFMAF 2018’s Filmmakers in Focus. Emphatically capturing 1980s migrant stories and the uncertain determination of a young girl, Shireen’s playful and perceptive Nervous Translation is the Festival’s closing film. ‘Propositions’ is a new strand which allows an artist or filmmaker to expand on their work and process through a talk, screening or—in the case of Jessica Sarah Rinland’s world premiere of Black Pond—also a walk. This year’s morning seminars—the informal discussion sessions with guest artists which have become a highlight of the past several Festivals—will be deftly guided by writer and curator Taylor Le Melle. Lucy Clout, Berwick Moving Image Artist in Residence, presents ‘Solvent Magazine’, a new body of work—part-waiting room, part-publishing house—in the beautiful Gymnasium Gallery. Thanks to our colleague James Lowther at Berwick Visual Arts for his huge work facilitating this residency and exhibition, as well as the Berwick Youth Project/Film Bee exhibition ‘The Hurt Goes On’. Other exhibitions include Patrick Staff’s film Bathing at Berwick’s nightlife mecca—and new festival venue—Charlie’s Night Club. Carolyn Lazard’s Consensual Healing feeds Octavia E. Butler, EMDR and scripted therapeutic protocols through the tunnel of the New Tower—a first time venue for the Festival. Driven by many nights of endless viewing and six-person Skype debates, Berwick New Cinema informs the festival’s DNA: resolutely contemporary films not restricted to any specific genre, budget or context. We are especially honoured to present world and European festival premieres from Luis Arnías, Beatrice Gibson, Tamara Henderson, Callum Hill, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Hardeep Pandhal, Tako Taal and Helena Wittman. Outset Scotland sponsor Berwick New Cinema’s prize money for the first time in 2018. Thank you! As well as Hamish Young whose work is supported by a Weston Jerwood Creative Bursary, programmers Letitia Calin, Ben Pointeker and Herb Shellenberger are joined in 2018 by Becca Voelcker, the Festival’s inaugural Programming Fellow. Herb has also curated Artist in Profile Sophia Al-Maria’s series, including a blistering exhibition at the Magazine—a former gunpowder store—and a special screening of Lips of Blood from horror-erotica auteur Jean Rollin for your Saturday night viewing pleasure! Bringing it all back home is a Festival Commission by artist, filmmaker and musician Luke Fowler. A collaboration with sound recordist Chris Watson, it is a captivating portrait of place in image and sound, adopting an infra-sensitive approach to two 16th century fortified cities: Pamplona in the north of Spain and our home town of Berwick.

Board & Team

Festival Office Jennifer Heald Administration and Finance Officer Diana Stevenson Festival Manager Peter Taylor Festival Director Hamish Young Programme Assistant and Associate Programmer BFMAF 2018 Team Botany Studio Web Design Katie Chappel Kaleidoscope Artist Facilitator Anna Muir Volunteer Coordinator Ryan Pebbles Festival Assistant Chloe Smith Kaleidoscope Artist Facilitator Val Tobiass Education Coordinator Emer Tumilty Design and Illustration Matthew Walkerdine Graphic Design Associate Programmers Letitia Calin Associate Programmer Ben Pointeker Associate Programmer Herb Shellenberger Associate Programmer and Publications Editor Becca Volker Associate Programmer Technical Team Januário Espeso Ashley Green Arnaud Moinet Liam Murray Board Huw Davies Chair Menelaos Gkartzios Chris Hardie Joe Lang Wendy Law Kelly Ling Andrew Ormston Scott Sherrard Laura Simpson Matt Stokes

The Festival is enriched by artist Emer Tumilty’s beautiful illustrations and graphic design by Matthew Walkerdine. Keeping it in the family, Matt’s band Vital Idles will also play at the Festival, sharing a bill with Yeah You! at Tweedmouth Bowling Club, as we venture ten minutes’ walk across the Tweed—pushing boundaries as ever ;-) There are many, many more people to thank, but in particular we thank you for being with us, being part of these very special four days, and making BFMAF the essential meeting point that we aspire for it to be! Peter Taylor 4

Opening Film: Empty Metal Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer

Closing Film: Nervous Translation Shireen Seno

United States

Philippines

2018 83 mins

International Premiere

Thursday 20 September, 19:30 Maltings Main House

Empty Metal takes place in a world similar to ours—one of mass surveillance, pervasive policing, and increasing individual apathy. The lives of several people, each inhabiting poles of American social and political consciousness, weave together as each attempts to achieve some kind of forward motion, sometimes in contradiction, and always under the eye of more controlling powers. A taut thriller, the film reveals a political fantasy, an alternative reality whose characters teeter on the dull knife edge that is contemporary American politics, at the same time refusing to fall right of left. Instead, they lash out from the soul, under the radar, in an attempt to achieve what their mainstream predecessors have yet to accomplish. ‘Filled with energy, rage, and the smallest measure of hope, Empty Metal is a new kind of political film for these extraordinary times’. —Film Society of Lincoln Center Q&A with filmmakers Adam Khalil & Bayley Sweitzer

2018 90 mins

Sunday 23 September, 20:00 Maltings Main House

Adam Khalil (Ojibway) is a filmmaker and artist. His practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of ethnography through humor, relation, and transgression. Adam’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Arts Center, UnionDocs, e-flux, Artist Space, Microscope Gallery (New York), Spektrum (Berlin), Trailer Gallery (Sweden), Carnival of eCreativity (Bombay). He is a 2017 Sundance Art of Nonfiction grantee, 2017 Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Opportunity Fellow, UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar. In 2011, he graduated from the Film and Electronic Arts program at Bard College. Bayley Sweitzer is a filmmaker from Southern Vermont, currently based in Brooklyn. His practice revolves around a dynamic, high-mobility engagement with the margins; a practice in which techno-formal precision is secondary to heartfelt vigor. His work has been shown at Film Society Lincoln Center, SEFF Binghamton, Anthology Film Archives, Rochester International Film Festival, Motel Gallery (New York) and MIIT House (Osaka). Bayley works professionally as a camera assistant and is a member of the International Cinematographers Guild, IATSE Local 600. Filmography: Adam Khalil: The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets (with Zack Khalil and Jackson Polys, 2018), INAATE/SE (with Zack Khalil, 2016) Bayley Sweitzer: Cor Childe (2015), The Economy (2012), Julian’s an Alien (2012), The Hills Have Houses (2011)

Set in 1987, soon after the People Power Revolution which led to the fall of president Marcos, Nervous Translation follows eightyear-old Yael. A shy and uneasy girl, she listens endlessly to the cassette tapes recorded by her father, who has spent years away from home working in Saudi Arabia. When she hears an advertisement for a pen that will give her a ‘wonderful life’, she decides to spend all her savings on this miracle pen. Yael’s world is small and tender—she likes to play cooking on her mini stove—but the real world comes knocking: a typhoon approaches the Philippines. Giving a voice to this quiet girl in a perceptive, playful film full of jump cuts, sensitive sound design, ‘80s music and even an odd surrealist intermezzo, Seno empathetically captures the innocence and uncertainty of a child who doesn’t yet understand the world, although she is surrounded by it.

UK Premiere Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

Visual artist and filmmaker Shireen Seno was born to a Filipino family in Japan. She graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.A. in Architectural Studies and Cinema Studies, and taught in Japan before relocating to Manila. She started out in film as a photographer, shooting stills for Lav Diaz and John Torres. Her work has been exhibited in the Philippines at mag:net gallery, Green Papaya Art Projects, Manila Contemporary, and the Ishmael Bernal Gallery at the University of the Philippines Film Center. In 2012, she had her first two solo exhibitions, ‘Mystery Terrain’ at Republikha Gallery and ‘Wild Grass’ at Light & Space Contemporary. Her first full-length film Big Boy, produced by Cinema One Originals and Peliculas Los Otros, had its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2013. Seno’s next feature Nervous Translation was one of 15 finalists for the Venice International Film Festival’s inaugural Biennale College Cinema 2013. Filmography: Nervous Translation (2018), Shotgun Trading (2014), Lovebird-watching (2012), Trunks (2012), Big Boy (2012), Seeing Machines (2006)

Introduction by filmmaker Shireen Seno UK premiere of Nervous Translation presented jointly by BFMAF and Tate Modern The film will be preceded by the 2018 Berwick New Cinema award presentation

Berwick New Cinema

2018 Berwick New Cinema Jury

Presenting the very best in artists’ moving image and new filmmaking, the Berwick New Cinema competition features resolutely contemporary films that transgress restraints of genre, capital and expectation. The Berwick New Cinema Competition features resolutely contemporary films that transgress restraints of genre, capital and expectation.

His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Berwick New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. Sonali Joshi has worked across film exhibition and education, distribution and screen translation throughout in the UK, France, Denmark and Asia. She holds a PhD in Cinema Studies (University of Glasgow) and MA in Media & Communications (Goldsmiths, University of London). Her PhD focused on iconic French actor Jean Pierre Léaud and Star Studies. In 2006 she established Day for Night, a London-based independent film company working across film exhibition and screen translation, drawing together her interests and diverse background. In 2012, she launched Day for Night’s distribution division as a natural extension of her curatorial work 8

Gail Pickering

Sonali Joshi

The 2018 Berwick New Cinema competition was researched and selected by Festival Director Peter Taylor, Associate Programmers Letitia Calin, Ben Pointeker and Herb Shellenberger, Programme Assistant Hamish Young and 2018 BFMAF Programming Fellow Becca Voelcker.

Sky Hopinka

The jury will present a trophy designed by Glasgow-based ceramicist Mariella Verkerk and a £1000 cash prize supported by Outset Scotland.

and involvement in numerous specialised film festivals. Since then, Day for Night has distributed films by an international roster of filmmakers including Anocha Suwichakornpong, Chaitanya Tamhane, Lee Chatametikool, Pimpaka Towira, Dominga Sotomayor and, most recently, Shireen Seno and John Torres. Sonali has just started producing her first feature film project, White Gold, directed by Bhutanese filmmaker Jamyang Jamtsho Wangchuk, after producing Wangchuk’s 2018 short The Open Door which had its world premiere at Locarno. Gail Pickering is an artist and filmmaker working across moving-image, installation and performance, her recent work explored overlooked histories of collective filmmaking and their relevance to a contemporary audience. Bringing together historical footage and new material developed with professional and non-professional actors and performers, Pickering has developed a particular language of montage, in front of the camera and in editing, that reflects the fragmentary relationships we have to history and society. Pickering’s work was recently the subject of two major institutional solo exhibitions at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Centre d’art Contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Paris. Her work was included in the 58th London Film Festival and in major survey exhibitions including Assembly A Survey of British Artists Film and Video at Tate Britain and the British Art Show 7, at the Hayward Gallery, London and touring; her ICA commissioned film Karaoke was broadcast on Channel 4 Television. Pickering was nominated for the Jarman Award 2015. Gail Pickering is a Reader in Fine Art in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London where she is the Programme Director for the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image.

Competition Programmes

Who’s the Daddy Wong Ping

Berwick New Cinema: ♦ Thursday 20 September, 14:00

Berwick New Cinema: ♥ Saturday 22 September, 14:15

Shine bright. Portraits of a nomadic musician and an animatedly-perverse single father butt up against a simulacrum of the Middle East and a tactile inquiry into the natural world. Taken together, expressions of personal, political, spiritual, mystical and sexual agency provide powerful statements of either resistance to or complicity in an increasingly commodified world.

Glittering and shimmering moments: the tender touch of your child; the lumbering gait of a dancer dressed in an improbable costume; the luxury of a well-earned day off work. These glances, snapshots and memories are bound together in films alternating between the mundane and fantastic.

Wong Ping Who’s the Daddy (page 11) Luis Arnías Punky Eye (page 12) Pathompon Mont Tesprateep Confusion Is Next (page 13) Gelare Khoshgozaran Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (page 14)

I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. That includes Chauvin-ists; children who disturb corpses; frightened men living in a matriarchal society; or a film crew consisting of a slime robot, talking mandrill and lesbian couple whose relationship crumbles under the glow of bisexual lighting.

Translation, transformation and transition: the final 2018 Berwick New Cinema competition programme focuses on shifting perspectives, the tension between the real and the virtual, and the relationship between mental and physical landscapes.

9 mins

Thursday 20 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

European Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♦

Q&A with filmmakers Stephanie Comilang & Beatrice Gibson

Berwick New Cinema: ♠ Sunday 23 September, 14:00

Q&A with filmmakers Hardeep Pandhal & Benjamin Crotty

2017

Stephanie Comilang Come to Me, Paradise (page 19) Beatrice Gibson I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (page 20) Tamara Henderson Seasons End (Out of Body) (page 21)

Berwick New Cinema: ♣ Friday 21 September, 12:30

Bertrand Mandico Apocalypse After (page 15) Hardeep Pandhal Pool Party Pilot Episode (page 16) Hu Bo The Man in the Well (page 17) Benjamin Crotty The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (page 18)

Hong Kong

Tako Taal You Know it But it Don’t Know You (page 22) Helena Wittmann Ada Kaleh (page 23) Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela Luminous Shadow (page 24) Callum Hill Crowtrap (page 25) Q&A with filmmakers Tako Taal & Callum Hill

Drawing its name and inspiration from a popular Chinese nursery rhyme, Who’s the Daddy tells the tale of a disgraceful man who has unexpectedly stumbled across the path of child-rearing. The viewer follows the man’s dating app trial as he attempts to evaluate potential partners’ political beliefs by analysing their profile photos. His eventual ‘match’ with a strictly religious woman, and their ensuing relationship, reveals the man’s shameful satisfaction with subjugation, a fetish that is further explored by a juxtaposition of references to his childhood memories. Through a combination of the man’s contemptible powerlessness and the woman’s tenuous religious beliefs, the protagonist ultimately takes on the merciless role of a single father. Ultimately though, Wong Ping’s animations are not meant to be discouraging. They are happy, in a darkly twisted yet realistic manner. Through their rawness, his works provide a sense of uncharacteristic comfort in that even our deepest and most private sentiments or acts are shared by others. In this way, Wong Ping’s work is liberating and perversely honest—a cathartic twist on the trials rooted in daily life.

Wong Ping (1984) is one of Hong Kong’s most exciting emerging artists. Flashing, pop-like imagery; visual and auditory narrations that explicitly touch upon sex, politics and social relations; vibrant installations that extend into three dimensions the artist’s fantastical animation world—these are but cornerstones of Wong Ping’s practice that combines the crass and the colourful to mount a discourse around repressed sexuality, personal sentiments and political limitations. Recent shows include, ‘One Hand Clapping’ at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and ‘Songs for Sabotage’ at New Museum, New York. Wong held a residency at the Chinese Centre for Contemporary Art (CFCCA) and has held exhibitions internationally in Manchester, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Berlin and Paris, amongst other locations. His animation films have been presented at numerous festivals internationally, from Belgium and the UK to Mexico and Australia. Wong’s work is held in several permanent collections including M+, Hong Kong; KADIST; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Fosun Art Foundation, Shanghai. Filmography: Dear, can I give you a hand? (2018), Wong Ping’s Fables 1 (2018), Who’s the Daddy (2017), Fetus Fetish (2017), Super Epic Infinite-Wild-QuadExtended-Ultra-Extreme-Clear-High-Definition Smart Television (2016), Jungle of Desire (2015), The Other Side (2015), Witch (2015), Blind Love (2015), An Emo Noise (2015), Doggy Love (2015), Stop Peeping (2014), Slow Sex (2013), lin pink pink (2011)

Punky Eye Luis Arnías Venezuela, United States

Confusion Is Next Pathompon Mont Tesprateep 2018

15 mins

Thursday 20 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

Luis Arnías’ enigmatic 16mm film Punky Eye (Ojo Malcriado) is structured into seven different chapters, though any hope of parsing a narrative cohesion from this structure is quickly dashed. A sneaker stepping on a ketchup packet, a mouse running frantically in a metal wheel, seeds being popped out of the head of a flower: sensual and sensory moments build upon one another, with tension and release doled out at unexpected moments. There are scenes of great beauty: a bird with very tired eyes blinks while a recording of Spanish-language absurdist poetry is heard; or a slow motion close-up of a powerful waterfall roars. Other moments show absolute absurdity: a man is forced to stop reading the newspaper when it’s become completely engulfed in flames; a breakfast of Fruit Loops cereal is poured out into a lake, milk and all. Arnías’ sequence of stunningly-shot and surprisingly-edited vignettes results in a strange and alluring film that builds to an ambiguous— but no less affecting—conclusion. —Herb Shellenberger

World Premiere

Thailand

Berwick New Cinema: ♦

Thursday 20 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

Luis Arnías (1982) is a filmmaker and sculptor from Venezuela who currently lives and works in Boston, MA. In 2009, he completed the diploma program at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Filmography: Punky Eye (2018), This Must be the Place (2011), Like (2010), The Fall (2009), A La Deriva (2006)

2018

22 mins

In Confusion is Next, nomadic musician Thom Assajan-Jakgawan appears as a fictionalised version of himself. Living in a fragile state, a collapsed country, Thom solitarily confines himself in an unoccupied room. Through meditative exploration, and the loops and layers of his sounds, he creates a mantra of protection. Between a dark history, and oneiric dystopia in the present, Confusion is Next is inspired by Endel Tulving’s hypothesis on ‘mental time travel’, where mechanisms of memory can evoke the future.

UK Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♦

Pathompon Mont Tesprateep was born in Bangkok but raised in Isan (the northeastern region of Thailand). He graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London. Since 2014, he has been working on a series of hand-processed 16mm and S-8 short films including Endless, Nameless (2014) and Song X (2017). His films have been shown at film festivals including Locarno Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, BFI London Film Festival and Les Rencontres Internationales. Mont received a completion grant from the programme ‘Frameworks’ (International Film Festival Rotterdam) to complete Confusion Is Next, which premiered at the festival in 2018. Together with Pathompon Mont Tesprateep, Thom AssajanJakgawan was a member of the band Assajan Jakgawan. Formed more than a decade ago, the band members have now gone their separate ways. One bandmate has passed away. Thom however continues to make music, performing under the name Thom AJ Madson. Utilising guitar, mics, loop machines and sometimes other objects he is currently working on two projects; Sap (bewitched) and Vimutti which means “liberation” in Pali. Filmography: Confusion is Next (2018), Song X (2017), Endless, Nameless (2014) Pathompon Mont Tesprateep’s Song X was screened in BFMAF 2017

Medina Wasl: Connecting Town Gelare Khoshgozaran

Apocalypse After Bertrand Mandico

United States, Iran

World Festival Premiere

France

Thursday 20 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

Berwick New Cinema: ♦

Friday 21 September, 12:30 Maltings Main House

Berwick New Cinema: ♣

Medina Wasl: Connecting Town focuses on the role of fiction and simulacrum in the United States Military training sites of the War on Terror. This quasi-documentary connects the current day militarized landscape of the Mojave Desert with that of Shatt al-Arab, a river that was a key military target for the US Military in Iraq. The film shows the perspective of the artist/documentarian/actor, dressed as a teenage Iranian soldier in the war with Iraq and enacting embodied experiences of remembering in the desert.

museums and world exhibitions to architecture, schooling, tourism, the fashion industry, and the commodification of everyday life’.

An abandoned seaside resort. The end of shooting a fantasy film about the end of the world. Apocalypse and Joy, two women involved in the movie, one an actor, the other the director, are about to end their relationship.

where actors—and especially actresses—are equally celebrated and consumed’. —Erwan Desbois

2018

31 mins

Not only do the US and its allies continue to dominate, exploit the resources of, and occupy the Middle East, the US practices its strategies in the simulacrum of the Middle East built on stolen Indigenous land in the Mojave Desert. The way the Middle East is constructed here ‘at home’ as a conflation of Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan—as a malleable placeholder for whatever country we are officially at war with—has its roots in the obvious relationship Timothy Mitchell establishes in Orientalism and The Exhibitionary Order: ‘The nineteenthcentury image of the Orient was constructed not just in Oriental studies, romantic novels, and colonial administrations, but in all the new procedures with which Europeans began to organize the representation of the world, from 14

In the context of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the series of world fairs that followed ‘what Arab writers found in the West’, Mitchell argues, ‘were not just exhibitions and representations of the world, but the world itself being ordered up as an endless exhibition. This world-as-exhibition was a place where the artificial, the model, and the plan were employed to generate an unprecedented effect of order and certainty’. ‫( نارذگشو خ هرالگ‬Gelare Khoshgozaran, 1986, Tehran) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working across video, installation performance and writing. She received her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2009 and her BFA from the University of Arts, Tehran. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at the Queens Museum of Art, Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Malmö Konsthall, LACE, The LA Municipal Art Gallery, Southern Exposure, Human Resources, Interstate Projects, The AC Institute, and Thomas Erben Gallery, among others. She was the recipient of the 2017 Art Matters Foundation fellowship, the 2016 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Award for Emerging Artists, the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the 2015 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Living and working in Los Angeles, she is the co-founding editor of contemptorary.org. Filmography: Medina Wasl: Connecting Town (2018), An Analog Poem (2016), Cosmos (2016), mm/dd/yyyy (2015), The Hemlock (2015), Speech (2013), rial and tERROR (2011), WHY (2011)

2018

32 mins

To delay Apocalypse’s departure and their last goodbye, Joy, the oldest of the two, tells her lover five dark stories. Five stories about women who don’t want to grow old. Five adventures in which science fiction, vulgarity, necrophilia, and poetry play a part. ‘Rather than telling a story Ultra pulpe follows a thread, inspired by the act of inventing and telling stories. Each sequence takes place on the set of one of the pulp movies directed by Joy (hence the title), skipping from one genre to the next: a post-apocalyptic future, a horror with monsters or ghosts, eroticism, a sciencefiction set on Mars… The structure of Ultra pulpe mimics the pattern of Russian nesting dolls, as each new person encountered by Joy becomes immediately, through a simple cut, not only the star of the following movie presented on screen but also its prey. In a manner which is at the same time captivating, playful and clearheaded, Mandico symbolises throughout Ultra pulpe the dual nature of cinema, an art form

UK Premiere

Bertrand Mandico (1971, Toulouse) graduated from the film directing programme at the Gobelins animation school in Paris. Over the years, he has cultivated a unique aesthetic and a flare for dark humour that juxtaposes macabre elements and burlesque. He has enriched his cinematic studies with various still format publications, photography, collage and drawings. Bertrand has also worked on promoting forgotten or underappreciated filmmakers, such as programming a Walerian Borowczyk retrospective in Warsaw. His audiovisual creations (over 40 short films, TV-commercials and musical films) have been awarded various prizes. Mandico’s first short film The Blue Horse Rider won the Annecy Prize Grant in 1998. He Was Eddy’s Dog was part of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival’s short selection. His project Boro in the Box, an irreverent portrait of Walerian Borowczyk, won the Clermont-Ferrand Festival Grant in 2008. The Wild Boys, selected at Venice IFF, was Mandico’s first feature length film. In 2018, his short film Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe) had a special screening in Cannes for the 57th Semaine de la Critique. Selected Filmography: Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe, 2018), The Wild Boys (Les Garçons sauvages, 2017), Depressive Cop (2016), Souvenirs d’un montreur de seins (2016), Y’a-t-il une vierge encore vivante? (2015), Notre Dame des Hormones (2014), Prehistoric Cabaret (2013), S... Sa... Salam... Sallammbô (2012), Living still life (2012), Boro in the box (2011), Lif Og Daudi Henry Darger (2011), Sa Majesté petites barbes (2010), Mie, l’enfant descend du songe (2009), Il dit qu’il est mort (2008), Essai 135 (2007), Tout ce que vous avez vu est vrai (2006), The Blue Horse Rider (Le Cavalier bleu, 1998)

Pool Party Pilot Episode Hardeep Pandhal United Kingdom

2018

9 mins

Friday 21 September, 12:30 Maltings Main House

Pool Party Pilot Episode shows a speculative vision taking cues from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland and Elaine Morgan’s aquatic ape hypothesis, particularly parts where the authors describe male fears of their surroundings. Herland describes the encounter of three men with an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis. The aquatic ape hypothesis aims to redress traditional evolutionary theories by focusing on the evolution of female bodies.

Man in the Well Hu Bo World Festival Premiere

China

Berwick New Cinema: ♣

Friday 21 September, 12:30 Maltings Main House

Hardeep Pandhal (1985, Birmingham) is an artist based in Glasgow. He was awarded a Leverhulme scholarship to complete the MFA programme at The Glasgow School of Art. His work was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2013), the Glasgow International Open Bursary (2013), the Drawing Room Bursary Award (2015) and the New Museum Triennial (2018). Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Liar Hydrant’, Cubitt, London (2018); ‘Konfessions of a Klabautermann’, Berwick Visual Arts and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (2017); ‘A Nightmare on BAME Street’, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017); ‘Hobson-Jobson’, Collective, Edinburgh (2015); ‘Plebeian Archive’, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow 2015); ‘A Neck or Nothing Man!’, Comar, The Isle of Mull (2015); ‘Joyous Thing with Maggots at the Centre’, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2014). Filmography: Lecture Theatre (with David Stearns, 2018), Pool Party Pilot Episode (2018), Konfessions of a Klabautermann (2017), TROSC REMIX (2017), Career Suicide (2016), Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain! (2015), Cut Aways (You Cannot Rule Without Laconism) (2015), Profane Illumination (2014), Jojoboys (2014), Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts, (2013), Visiting Paolo Chiasera’s Tupac Project (2013), Boners, Durbar and Inmates (2012) Hardeep Pandhal’s Konfessions of a Klabautermann was commissioned for BFMAF 2017

2018

16 mins

Hu Bo’s posthumously-released short film Man in the Well was produced at the FIRST International Film Festival in Xining, China. Supervised by Béla Tarr, the seminar’s theme was ‘Apocalypse’, and Hu Bo succeeds in delivering a stark, atmospheric vision of end times that stacks up against the Hungarian auteur’s bleakest moments. Man in the Well follows two starving kids, digging through the rubble of an abandoned building. Their survival impulse apparent, the duo also have something of a destructive streak, recalling both visually and in temperament the brutal gang of anoraked children in Shuji Terayama’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup. With an economy of means and a looming weight, the film ends with a disappearance, its young protagonists covered in blood and staring off into the middle distance. Much is left unspoken and any shred of innocence that could have remained until now is gone. —Herb Shellenberger & Becca Voelcker

UK Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♣

Acclaimed novelist turned director HU Bo (1988–2017) graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 2014 with a Bachelor’s degree in directing. His short film Distant Father (2014) won Best Director at Golden Koala Chinese Film Festival, and Night Runner (2014) was selected by Taipei Film Festival. Hu Bo took his own life soon after finishing his first feature, An Elephant Sitting Still (2018), which won awards in Berlinale (where it premiered), Hong Kong IFF, IndieLisboa and New Horizons IFF. His 2017 short Man in the Well was produced at the FIRST International Film Festival, Xining under the supervision of Béla Tarr, and had its premiere at Locarno in 2018. Filmography: An Elephant Sitting Still (Da xiang xi di er zuo, 2018), Man in the Well (Jing li de ren, 2017), Distant Father (2014), Night Runner (2014), Fleeing by Night (2014)

The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin Benjamin Crotty

Come To Me, Paradise Stephanie Comilang

France

UK Premiere

Hong Kong, Canada

Friday 21 September, 12:30 Maltings Main House

Berwick New Cinema: ♣

Saturday 22 September, 14:15 Maltings Main House

While accepting a lifetime achievement award, Nicolas Chauvin—farmer-soldier, veteran of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the father of chauvinism—launches into a grand monologue reflecting on his life, sending him back in time and space...until, at a bend on a moonlit road, an encounter with a spectral figure will change his (non-)existence forever. —Benjamin Crotty

and misogynist bigotry—with a character who is simultaneously despicable and utterly charming. He tosses off contemporary references from Deliveroo to Depardieu; describes himself as ‘a grenadier [by profession]…but a machinegunner in the sack’; and, for no other reason than to get a rise out of his audience, exclaims ‘Jew!’ A timely study of social and political mores especially relevant to contemporary Europe and North America, The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin interestingly connects history to current events through a satirical, surprising and altogether quite inventive approach. —Herb Shellenberger

Filipina-Canadian filmmaker Stephanie Comilang’s Come to Me, Paradise indirectly takes as its subject the increasingly documented struggle of migrant Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose occupation is characterized by rampant conditions of forced labor, exploitation, and human trafficking. The film conjures an intimate and complex portrait of the domestic workers’ everyday lives through examining the women’s ritual of digitally transmitting their stories and memories back to the Philippines at the end of each working week. A deft mixture of science fiction and documentary, Come to Me, Paradise employs a tone that’s equal measures dissociative, casual, and understatedly spiritual.

2018

26 mins

Opening to the vigorous strains of ‘Hooray for Hollywood’, The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin is a grand fête of the perhaps apocryphal French soldier, providing a convincing argument that Chauvin was the meme of his era. Commanding the stage with swagger of a stand-up comedian—complete with jabs at docile audience members and a drummer playing rimshots— the battle-worn soldier, in eyepatch and tattered military garb, launches into a speech which takes him all the way back to his birth, on ‘the best day of the best year of the best country of the best planet of the best solar system in the world’. Out of time in any era, Chauvin’s retrospective journey is interrupted by a mythical encounter which alters the course of his personal history.

2017

24 mins

UK Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♥

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. She received her BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.

Benjamin Crotty’s work has been shown in film festivals including Locarno, Rotterdam, TIFF and NYFF, and in institutions such as Tate Modern and MoMA. His first feature film Fort Buchanan premiered at Locarno before screening in numerous international film festivals and enjoying commercial runs in Paris and New York. He lives and works in Paris. Filmography: The Glorious Acceptance of Nicolas Chauvin (2018), Division Movement to Vungtau (with Bertrand Dezoteux, 2017), Collapse! Chroniques d’un monde en déclin (2016), Fort Buchanan (2014), Fort Buchanan: Hiver (2012), Liberdade (with Gabriel Abrantes, 2011), Visionary Iraq (with Gabriel Abrantes, 2008)

Benjamin Crotty handily stretches out both meanings of chauvinism—extreme nationalism 18

I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead Beatrice Gibson

Seasons End: Out of Body Tamara Henderson

United Kingdon, United States, Italy 2017 24 mins

European Premiere

United Kingdom, Canada

Saturday 22 September, 14:15 Maltings Main House

Berwick New Cinema: ♥

Saturday 22 September, 14:15 Maltings Main House

Berwick New Cinema: ♥

Seasons End: Out of Body captures and extends Tamara Henderson’s multi-part exhibition and body of work ‘Seasons End’, which has transformed over the last several years in Glasgow, Los Angeles, Oakville, Ontario and London. Henderson’s work holistically combines media and forms, becoming a cross-contamination of painting, sculpture, costumes, choreography, film and installation. It’s impossible to separate any of the parts, as each is dependent upon the others in creating the universe that her work builds and invites viewers to inhabit.

process, as well as a beguiling and confounding construction of image, sound and motion. —Herb Shellenberger

Developed with American poets CAConrad and Eileen Myles on the eve of the 45th presidential inauguration in February 2017, I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead is shot throughout the following year in America and Western Europe, with reference to mass refugee migration across the Mediterranean, the Grenfell Fire in London, and the consequences of political upheaval and war. Yet the film is also a deeply intimate work featuring seemingly-benign images of Gibson’s daily life. Seeking out the power of ritual, and casting the poet as prophet fit to navigate a different path through times of perilous authority, Gibson’s film proposes a way of moving through chaos with intimacy and empathy. I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead features a soundtrack by Laurence Crane and Pauline Oliveros. I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead is a KW Production Series co-commission with Camden Arts Centre (London), Bergen Kunsthall (Bergen) and Mercer Union (Toronto)

Beatrice Gibson is a Franco-British artist living and working in London. Gibson has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for Short Film, in 2009 with A Necessary Music and in 2013 for The Tiger’s Mind. She was the Winner of the 2015 Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel. Recent solo exhibitions include, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, MUDAM Luxembourg, (2016) Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Statements, Art Basel, (2015) Index, Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, CAC Bretigny, Paris (2013) and The Showroom, London (2012). Gibson has been the subject of screenings at SCHIRN Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, ICA (London), Whitechapel Gallery and Serpentine Gallery. Her films have shown at numerous experimental film venues and film festivals. She has been on the jury of International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Jarman Award and 25fps, Zagreb. Gibson’s films are distributed by LUX and she is represented by Laura Bartlett. Filmography: I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead (2018), Solo for Rich Man (2015), Crippled Symmetries (2015), F for Fibonacci (2014), Agatha (2012), The Tiger’s Mind (2012), The Future’s Getting Old Like the Rest of Us (2010), A Necessary Music (2008)

2018

26 mins

But that’s what makes Henderson’s films— Seasons End: Out of Body in particular—such perfect expressions of her multifaceted practice: through montage, shifts in perspective and over a duration of time, they can effectively shift the viewer’s focus, create startling and ambiguous resonances, and even transport one’s mind and body in ways not possible through other media. Making concrete the connections between objects in nature and her beautifully outlandish costumes, or condensing massive shifts in time, geography and perspective, Seasons End: Out of Body becomes at once a document of the artist’s exhibitions, performances, travels and

World Festival Premiere

Tamara Henderson (1982, Canada) is an artist working across sculpture, text, installation and 16mm film. She studied at NSCAD University in Halifax and Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, and holds a Master degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She has exhibited at Glasgow International and documenta 13, and recently staged a performance for the Serpentine Gallery’s 2017 Park Nights series. Solo exhibitions include Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2018); Oakville Galleries (2017); Rodeo Gallery, London (2017); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2016); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016); ICA, Philadelphia (2015); and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2014). Henderson had a solo screening in 2018 at Tate Modern. Filmography: Seasons End: Out of Body (2018), Consider the Belvedere (with Julia Feyrer, 2015), What’s Up Doc? (2014), Gliding in on a Shrimp Sandwich (with Jeannine Han, 2014), Accent Grave on Ananas (2013), Three Pockets di Oggetti (with Tiziana La Melia, 2013), Bottles Under the Influence (with Julie Feyrer, 2012), Spirit of Garfield (2012), Western Fade Out (2010)

You Know it but it Don’t Know You Tako Taal

Ada Kaleh Helena Wittman

United Kingdon

World Festival Premiere

Germany

Berwick New Cinema: ♠

Sunday 23 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

2017

7 mins

Sunday 23 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

You Know it but it Don’t Know You combines images of students from the Gambia Hospitality and Tourism Institute with a commentary of Mandinka words and their English translations taken from a list Nain (the filmmaker’s grandmother) wrote in 1986. Filmed shortly after the 2016 Gambian presidential election, the work reflects particular moments in time, the student’s gestures and Nain’s list embodying a search for knowledge and understanding through exercises of curiosity and welcome. —Tako Taal If catering to the rich, white European is a matter of economic survival, the suppression and devaluation of one’s own ways of doing (and being and feeling) is a matter of a psychic battle. The tacit meanings concealed in the representation of the ‘other’ are summoned back into the frame in an act of reverse translation by Tako Taal, who insists on reminding us of the myriad silences effected at the cost of our own curious gaze. —Letitia Calin

Tako Taal is an artist, filmmaker and programmer based in Glasgow. Born in Wales to Gambian and Welsh parents, Taal’s work uses family history to trace the shifts, merge and split in boundaries between body, land and state. Her films have been included in international screening programmes. Recent exhibitions include ‘Inherited Premises’, Grand Union, (Birmingham) and ‘Compound’, Intermedia Gallery, CCA (Glasgow). Filmography: Halo Nevus (2018), I fa mo ketta (it’s been a long time, 2017), Table d’hôte (2017), You Know it but it Don’t Know You (2017), We Must Travel Through Something (2014)

2018

15 mins

Inquiring into the conditions necessary for harmonious social relationships, Ada Kaleh takes its name from a little-known island on the Danube River. Mythologised by Hungarian author Mór Jókai in 1872, it was submerged one century later during the construction of the Romanian-Yugoslavian Iron Gates hydroelectric power station. The film effects a movement from the personal to the political—and from the domestic to the geopolitical—through a meticulous attunement to the cohabiting rhythms of the residents of a shared house, tracing their negotiation of space, privacy and sociality in a precarious ecosystem of sharing, intimacy and communion. Using continuous shots and richly-detailed close-ups, the material and affective surroundings of a simple sharing arrangement are rendered with gentle care and generous attention. An act of patient witnessing converts into a thinking and feeling-through of new ways of being together. In a present of polarised and fragmented social relations, it defiantly claims the ability to imagine new social and political communities. —Letitia Calin

European Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♠

Helena Wittmann was born 1982 in Neuss, Germany. Originally studying Spanish and Media Studies in Erlangen and Hamburg, she went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK), where she graduated in 2014. Her works, including her first feature film Drift (2017) and the short films 21,3°C (2014) and Wildnis (2013) were shown internationally at film festivals and exhibitions. Helena Wittmann works and lives in Hamburg, Germany. Filmography: OFF (with Luise Donschen, 2018), Ada Kaleh (2018), DRIFT (2017), TENDER NOISE AT NIGHT (2017), ANTHONY MCCALL: CROSSING THE ELBE (2015), LOOK! THE SEA! (2015), LATER (2015), 21,3°C (2014), WILDNIS (2013), KREISEN (2010) Helena Wittmann’s Drift was screened in BFMAF 2017

Luminous Shadow Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela

Crowtrap Callum Hill

Portugal

UK Premiere

United Kingdom

Berwick New Cinema: ♠

Sunday 23 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

2018

22 mins

Sunday 23 September, 14:00 Maltings Main House

Luminous Shadow is born of an artistic residency process developed in proximity with the collection and the curatorial prism of the International Arts Center José de Guimarães.

Mariana Caló (1984, Portugal) and Francisco Queimadela (1985, Portugal) began their sharing and collaboration during their studies at the Fine Arts Academy in Porto. Since 2010, the duo have built a practice that is developed through a privileged use of moving images, intersecting installation and site-specific environments with drawing, painting, photography and sculpture. Filmography: Luminous Shadow (2018), The Mesh and the Circle (2014)

2018

15 mins

Crowtrap is a documentary fiction work by Callum Hill. Weaving together the lives of two men, this short film draws upon their individual dealings with fire to expand across themes such as pyromania, anarchy, radicalism and enlightenment. Since 1989, seventy-nine pieces of the original Berlin wall have formed the contained space of a coal yard in Prenzlauer Berg, East Berlin. Born in the GDR, the man who created and runs this charged site has a particularly haunted relationship to the fragments of history; the enclosure protects the pieces of coal like a dormant volcano. Through a fictionalised portrayal, Hill parallels this man’s story with that of a heather burner in North Yorkshire, who witnessed the Piper Alpha Disaster of 1988. Whilst the film focuses on the psychology of these two men, it simultaneously gestures to the UK’s political climate and its imminent withdrawal from the EU. The film’s erratic movement is guided by the artist herself, whose presence as both a narrator and character is key to the film’s folding and unfolding across times and spaces both real and imagined.

World Festival Premiere Berwick New Cinema: ♠

Callum Hill is a British artist working in film, sculpture and photography. Her films are led by real characters, locations and experiences. From these factual starting points she constructs idiosyncratic, at times erratic narratives, often situating herself in direct relationship to the particularities of each story. Socially engaged and polemical in tone, her work questions the socio-political psychology and physical architecture we are ‘incarcerated’ within. She has been awarded Arts Council England Grants in 2015, 2017 and 2018 for the production of new work. From 2017-2018 she was part of Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship. She was recently artist in residence at Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples, developing a new film work set in the city. Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2019 include LUX, London and PS2, Belfast. She studied BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College (2009) and MA Moving Image at the Royal College of Art, London (2016). Filmography: British summer (2018), Solo Damas (2016), For Eva Rising (2016)

Propositions Part-screening, part-talk or performance, Propositions provides a discursive setting for artists and filmmakers to expand on their work, demonstrating research, contexts and perspectives as a means to dig deeper into the questions, ideas and complications encountered through their artistic process. Sky Hopinka Friday 21 September 17:15 (page 27)

Sky Hopinka 65 mins Friday 21 September, 17:15 Maltings Henry Travers

Propositions

Filmmaker Sky Hopinka presents a screening of his short films in conversation with Nicole Yip, Director of LUX Scotland. Based in Milwaukee, Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) focuses on the interconnections between his indigenous homeland, language, landscapes and identity. Anchored by both surreal perspectives and grounded realities, Hopinka’s sublime films create maps of dreams and memories, pushing against cultural and personal boundaries, creating meaning where none had existed before.

Special thanks to Ruth Hodgins, Walker Art Center

Jessica Sarah Rinland (plus walk) Saturday 22 September 12:15 (page 31) Islanders Saturday 22 September 15:00 (page 32) Morgan Quaintance Sunday 23 September 16:00 (page 33)

Hopinka will read from his debut publication Around the Edge of Encircling Lake (2018) and the screening will include: Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song, 2014, US, 9 mins Jáaji Approx, 2015, US, 15 mins I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become, 2016, US, 12 mins Dislocation Blues, 2017, US, 17 mins Fainting Spells, 2018, US, 12 mins 26

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigneous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and N ew Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Berwick New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. Filmography: Fainting Spells (2018), Dislocation Blues (2017), Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017), I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016), Visions of an Island (2016), Jáaji Approx. (2015), Venite et Loquamur (2015), Kunįkaga Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcome Song (2014), wawa (2014) Sky Hopinka’s Dislocation Blues won the 2017 Berwick New Cinema Award and his film Visions of an Island was shown in an exhibition during BFMAF 2016

The Centers of Somewhere Sky Hopinka

‘You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out’.1 The snow is falling again. It hasn’t stuck around, so much as it’s come and gone in brief blankets turning in the season. 2 I remember the first time I felt this cold, and I remember last year, in the winter and in the snow, driving toward and leaving from a settlement in the center of the plains.3 Even those memories I’m unsure of, where they came from or through whose eyes I’m looking when I greet them. Without the hurried seasons following every anchor encircling the Earth, I’d be lost in my own recollections and misunderstandings, perpetuating my own idea of selfhood. That’s not enough anymore. My certitude of my uncertainty has never felt more fortified. There’s so much that I don’t know, but I often don’t feel comfortable admitting as much. The politics surrounding identity are such that one must be an expert on almost everything concerning your own culture, race, identities, identifiers, etc., and to not know those questions inevitably brings about some form of ineptitude or annoyance and weariness at having to teach. It’s a bleary oscillation between these modes of being, presenting and performing. Whenever these couplings come up in broader culture it always reads as new and old. Same answer, different question. Creator is dead, so is Vine, and I’m not feeling too well myself.4 I’m a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin (enrolled with a number) and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians (not enrolled at all), and those qualifiers and what they mean for me oscillate as well. It’s certainly a part of who I am, to me and my own definition of self. It’s also a way in for non-Natives to contextualize my experience and allow that experience to become authoritative and representative. As an Indigenous filmmaker, I’m often asked about representation of Native peoples in the arts and in the media.5 Whenever I’m asked about Joseph Boyden or Jimmie Durham or Sam Durant, I shrug and try and say something meaningful while debating whether to admit that I don’t know much about them, their art or their writings. There’s a large portion of myself that doesn’t want to know about them. These are concerns that draw time, energy and attention away from the work that I want to do and want to see by others challenging current cultural currencies. But to ignore it is impossible. Because who we are is intrinsically defined by who we are not. Because conversations about identity are more necessary—and more dangerous—than ever. How we are perceived and represented has repercussions on how we can move forward, both internally and externally. Sometimes it’s dealing with the assertion and prioritization of white guilt, and sometimes it can be a conversation and not a fight. It’s a part of an ongoing process. To be free from the anxieties of self-definition by attrition can be a luxury with a severe cost. ‘White desire is already always weaponized’.6 I remember sometime in the mid-2000s talking with a friend about mascots. Again, I didn’t think it was important and followed that thought with a list of what I thought were more pressing issues in Indian Country.7 I was dismissive and aloof. But I was wrong. Understanding who I am today, a person who is a result of systemic oppression on many levels—from aggressions both micro and macro—has shaped and coerced the way that I navigate the world and perceive myself within it. It was when I realized that the culture at large doesn’t care about Indigenous People that I began to understand that my dismissal of something as trivial seeming as a sport mascots was a reflection of the attitude of the dominant culture

back onto me. To not see how the dehumanization of cartoonish caricature or savage stereotype are violent is to participate and perpetuate. For every ten people who respond with an affirmation that they agree, in solidarity or alliance, there’s always one person who has that Indian friend who says they just don’t care, that it’s fine by them. Or that person who brings up the Notre Dame Fighting Irish or the Minnesota Vikings as examples of exemplary respect given through mascots based on cultural communities, who maybe doesn’t remember the history of oppression those groups of people faced while they immigrated to the United States, a colonial history that has largely glossed over the nuanced culture of Scandinavian peoples and reduced them to horned rapists and pillagers. That the Irishman of Notre Dame is a caricature of a drunk who likes to fight—a stereotype that Native people have had thrust on upon them for a long time. They don’t care about us and laugh when we turn on each other. It’s important to see oneself reflected in the society we live in. More purposefully, it’s essential to see oneself reflected with potential and hope in the society we want to live in. I remember watching Star Trek: Voyager when I was 12 years old and thinking it was strange to see an Indian on TV, one who had an Indian-sounding name, who was a prominent sidekick but one with agency. I remember the criticism that Robert Beltran (the actor who played the character Chakotay) faced from Native people I knew when it was revealed that he was of Mexican descent and, therefore, not a real ‘Indian’. That logic quickly undermines itself, and to see a divisive line between Indigenous People in the United States and those south of a subjective border is nonsensical. But it’s what we’re taught. Lateral oppression—lateral violence—is too real. We are taught how to create Others out of our family, neighbors and kin. Yet the contemporary definition of Indigeneity is growing, and with that there will inevitably be a new way to describe the assertion of individuality against overwhelming forces that seek to homogenize those who don’t speak the right kind of English, who don’t go to church, who look the way that they look and want to be called what they want to be called. Discussions of self-determination beyond political realms of sovereignty are catalysts for whatever is next—to reject violent ascriptions of identity and to not be humiliated and be accepting of that humiliation. ‘Every spectator is either a coward or a traitor’.8 I’ve asked myself many, many times if the type of videos that I make are helping me move toward my ideals or are a distraction from their realization. Ideally: they’re part of the praxis of decolonization theory. Practically: they’re propositions for what Indigenous cinema could be. Cynically: they’re self-indulgent and not reflective of the urgency of the times we live. But what is urgent is what exists beyond myself and my experience. I’m not only the oppressed. I’m also an oppressor. As a hetero, cis-gendered male in this society I am afforded privileges that others are not. That line above, from Frantz Fanon, has stuck with me for some time now. I’d rather be neither a coward nor a traitor, but I fear that I’m both. Those binaries of condemnation bring feelings of flight and immobility. I hear the call but often don’t know what to do, what to say, or what not to say. I’m effectively a spectator by being a cameraperson. I’d rather experience a moment in time through a lens and repurpose and reshape those images into something reflective of my own desire for understanding whatever cosmologies are at work, but often that isn’t enough—

Jessica Sarah Rinland and shouldn’t be enough. I question myself: who I’ve been, who I’ve become and who I hope to be. I’m inherently and directly Othered by the construct of race imposed on me, and I’m inherently and directly complicit in maintaining these power structures by my identity and by knowingly and unknowingly participating in those toxic and hurtful behaviors. I’m trying to understand how both my privilege and oppression affect me and, in turn, those around me. How to support those who are suffering without hijacking their healing and making it about mine. I’m beginning to understand how to be a listener, without being a spectator, and knowing that it is a pursuit of process rather than certainty.

Black Pond

United Kingdom, United States

2018

43 mins

World Premiere

Saturday 22 September, 12:15 Maltings Henry Travers

Propositions

Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland presents the world premiere of her film Black Pond, a film that explores the activity within a common land in the south of England. Previously occupied by the 17th century agrarian socialists The Diggers, the land is currently inhabited by a Natural History Society whose occupations include bat and moth trapping, mycology, tree measuring and botanical walks.

14:30 River Walk Join artist Jessica Sarah Rinland and Kate Dixon, Berwick Parks Manager, for a river walk. Collect a free ticket from the Maltings Box Office, the starting point for an approximately 1 hour wildlife exploration along the River Tweed.

‘I sat in a warm rain that didn’t hurt my face’.9 Mark K. Tilsen shared that line on social media, remembering a moment at camp during everything.10 It’s a beautiful line, a beautiful sentiment for the changing patterns of nature and how certain moments of calm can heal our pain. Everything we didn’t know about suddenly appeared in front of us and all we could do was try to find sense somewhere. There never was any time for making sense out of ourselves. Each minute was swallowed up by limitless idea and limited mobility. This has gone astray. I’ve left out a lot. I’ve mentioned too much. There are many threads being woven together to attempt to form and ritualize something less clear. Now, I turn back around toward those who made many of these impressions possible. For some time now, I’ve written down the names of people who have taught me things. It’s far from complete; with every name I write, I try to remember the names I’ve forgotten or didn’t see for their gift. Still, it’s a small gesture toward keeping track of those flashes of uncertainty, and how someone added to a constellation of voiced and voiceless ways of being. That list serves as reminder that a difference between learning and knowing is little more than asking questions without the entitlement of an answer, and honoring the vulnerability in saying and hearing: ‘I don’t know’. Creator isn’t dead, but it’s good to check in. Vine Deloria, Jr. lives on through his writings and legacy.11 And I’ll be okay, because the middle of nowhere is the center of somewhere. 1 Georges Perec, ‘The Street’, in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin Books, 1974. 2 It’s not important where I am. Just place yourself in a ponderous place on an early winter afternoon with nowhere to be. 3 Oceti at Standing Rock.

4 Eugène Ionesco said something like that. 5 I use the adnouns “Indigenous” and “Native” with specificity, as each represents a nebulous idea.

6 Frank B. Wilderson III, ‘Why I Don’t Vote,’ opening remarks in an ASUCI-sponsored debate, University of California, Irvine, October 17, 2016: http://www.academia.edu/29401599/Why_I_Don_t_Vote.doc 7 I also use “Indian” to represent something hazily specific. 8 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961. 9 An Oglala Lakota poet/thinker.

10 Again, Standing Rock. 11 Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Sioux author/thinker.

‘The Centers of Somewhere’ was published 16 April 2018 as an Artist Op-Ed in The Walker Reader, the Walker Art Center’s digital magazine found online at walkerart.org

After two years of filming on the land, the footage was shown to the members of the Society. Their memories and responses were recorded and subsequently used as part of the film’s narration. The film does not offer a comprehensive record of the history of humans within the area. Instead, it explores more intimately, human’s relationship with and within land and nature. Following the film, Rinland will dissect and expose materials related to the film, detailing content from a forthcoming publication related to the film. She will stage moments from the Society’s yearly town hall meetings, discuss historical maps and laws, letters of complaint and footage she shot in the same location years before her encounter with them.

Argentine-British artist filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland has exhibited work in galleries, cinemas, film festivals and universities internationally including New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Edinburgh International Film Festival and Bloomberg New Contemporaries. She has received grants from Arts Council England, Wellcome Trust, Elephant Trust and elsewhere. Residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Kingston University, Locarno Academy and Berlinale Talents. In 2016, she exhibited a multi-screen, randomized installation We Account The Whale Immortal at Somerset House, London. She has been a 2017 Schnitzer Prize awardee at MIT, and is currently an Associate Artist at Somerset House Studios and a Film Studies Center Fellow at Harvard University. Filmography: Black Pond (2018), Ý Berá - Aguas de Luz (Bright Waters) (2016), Expression of the Sightless (2016), The Blind Labourer (2016), Necropsy of a Harbour Porpoise (Seeing From our Eyes into Theirs) (2015), Not As Old As The Trees (2014), Adeline For Leaves (2014), Description of a Struggle (2013), Electric Oil (2012), Nulepsy (2011), Nulepsy Attack (2009), The Big Fish Theory (2009), Darse Cuenta (2008), Fog (2008), The Laughing Man (2008), To Rock and To Cease (2008)

Giles Bailey, Jamie Hammill, Nellie Saunby & Sophie Soobramanien Islanders

Morgan Quaintance

Saturday 22 September, 15:00 Maltings Henry Travers

Sunday 23 September, 16:00 Maltings Henry Travers

Propositions

Artist, writer and curator Morgan Quaintance presents his new film Another Decade, alongside a programme of material that extends and details themes within it.

examining the artist’s experiences growing up in South London—will be accompanied by several clips from a video pen pal exchange project facilitated by artist Russell Newell in 1994–95. Exchanged between kids in London and Los Angeles, the videos show participants talking about their neighbourhoods, giving tours of their schools, and discussings aspects of their culture like music, fashion and gangs.

United Kingdom

2018

30 mins

Join us for the first draft of Islanders, a new collaborative work combining live performance with moving image sequences. The work builds on strategies of co-authorship and ways to work together developed over the course of the 2-year project ‘Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects’, which previously led to the live events ‘World is Sudden: Part I’ and ‘Take the Credits’ at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s 2016 and 2017 editions. Through collaged fragments, the work explores the construction of island identity at a point when the UK’s relationship to other landmasses and the sea around it is in flux. By collectively expanding and re-staging historical diverse representations of islands that exist in the popular imagination, Islanders offers a collage of material to propose critical relationships to states of isolation, political fantasy and the promise of rescue. Commissioned by CIRCA Projects in partnership with Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Middlesbrough Art Weekender, Tyneside Cinema and Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England 32

World Premiere / Festival Commission Propositions

Giles Bailey works largely with performance, writing or strategically appropriating texts that he performs himself. Exhibitions and performances have been hosted variously by CCA Glasgow, Kunsthalle Basel, The Hepworth (Wakefield), The Northern Charter (Newcastle), The Chisenhale Gallery (London), OUTPOST Gallery (Norwich), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow) and Kunst Werke (Berlin). Newcastle-based artists Sophie Soobramanien, Jamie Hammill and Nellie Saunby graduated from Newcastle University’s Fine Art programme in 2018. Previously they co-initiated the curatorial collective Double Yolk and have exhibited their work at Newcastle University Degree Show, Copeland Park, isthisit? and 36 Lime Street. CIRCA Projects is an organisation, ran by Adam Phillips, Dawn Bothwell and Sam Watson, that collaborates with local and international artists and partners. They initiate contemporary art situations that explore context and format, rooted in the specific conditions of the northeast of England. In 2016, they invited artist Giles Bailey to join their organisation for a 2-year period – open-endedly exploring how artist and curator(s) might work together, employing de-organisation and dialogue as a tool to rethink the ‘art commission’.

Another Decade United Kingdom

2018

13 mins

Another Decade combines archive and found footage from the 1990s with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Starting from testimonies and statements made by artists and art historians during the 1994 INIVA conference ‘Towards a New Internationalism’, Another Decade ranges across diverse cultural territory, and is propelled by a sense that very little sociocultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom since that time. The dynamic tension explored in the work is between, on the one hand, art world actors speaking a truth to institutional power and, on the other, lived realities of London’s multiracial citizenry. Those who necessarily inhabit a centre of otherness. These are positions that are drawn out in the selection of films that make up the accompanying programme. A suite of new works made by Quaintance—including a rumination on British Empire and the English countryside set to the words of Jimmie Durham, as well as a work

World Festival Premiere

While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical view over the decade, this range of films seek to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, more iconoclastic and more confrontational decade. Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist, writer and curator. His critical essays and texts have been published widely, whilst many curated exhibitions and events have been staged across the UK. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA (Amsterdam) and Cubitt Gallery (London) and is featured in the 2018 London Film Festival. A solo exhibition at KARST (Plymouth) will open in early 2019. In December this year, Quaintance will travel to Dakar, Senegal to begin work on a film there. Filmography: Another Decade (2018), Letter from Tokyo (2018), Eight Years: Time Served as a Critic of Contemporary Art (2018)

Exhibitions Artists present new and recent moving image work in exhibitions around Berwickupon-Tweed, taking over historic buildings, empty shops and hidden corners of the town. Exhibitions Walking Tour Sunday 23 September, 11:30 Collect a free ticket from the Maltings Box Office, the starting point for an informal exhibitions walking tour (lasting approximately 1.5–2 hours) with the Festival team.

Bathing Patrick Staff United States 2018

18 mins

World Festival Premiere

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 Charlie’s Night Club

Exhibition

Bathing explores themes of contamination, cleanliness, and debility through performance and dance. It is an adaptation of a performance Staff developed that features a solo performer moving in and out of a shallow basin of water. Between the performer’s movements, the video intersperses images of oil, spit, fluid landscapes, and U.S. border patrol, with flashes of a dog lost to a blissful state of chaos.

the toxic as a possible source of liberation from conservative notions of well-being and capacity, Bathing also asks us to consider the inherent privilege in celebrating states of disorder and from whom those privileges are commonly withheld.

The work draws on Staff’s research into the classical figure of the bather, chemical effects, drunken revelry, and the spiritello figures that commonly adorn European fountains. The performer’s continuous actions and gestures eventually lead to overexertion of the body. A fluid cross-contamination between substance, performer, and image occurs, bringing to mind the ways in which bodies absorb and release chemicals, hormones, and other agents—a means of survival for some and potentially lethal for others.

Patrick Staff (1987, UK; lives and works in Los Angeles and London) studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009), and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Their work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Tate Modern, London (2012); and Whitstable Biennale, UK (2012). They have received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists (2015). Staff has had residencies at FD13 Residency for the Arts (2018), LUX (2014), The Showroom (2014), Fogo Island Arts (2012), and Banff Centre (2010). Filmography: Bathing (2018), Weed Killer (2017), Dear Hester (Reversed) (2015), The Foundation (2015) Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer was screened in BFMAF 2017 and Dear Hester (Reversed) was screened in BFMAF 2016

The video embraces feelings of anxiety induced by stagnant water and its pollution, while expressing ambivalence about the supposed opposition between inebriation and good health, suggesting that states of intoxication may be compared to a queer mode of being. However, while offering 34

What the Sun Has Seen Agnieszka Polska Greece, Germany 2017

7 mins

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 Bankhill Ice House

Agnieszka Polska’s unsettling perspective on humanity takes the form of an animated child-faced sun with melancholy eyes. Digitally sourced images paint a frantic image of a crumbling world. From a distance, the sun jokes about environmental issues and comments on the tumultuous times in which the world finds itself. The film borrows its title from a poem by Polish poet of the realist/positivist style Maria Konopnicka (1842–1910). The poem ‘What the sun has seen’ recounts in a childish style the quotidian, peaceful rural activities and happy family life of the nation in the countryside, as observed by the sun on its daily journey across the sky. Polska offers her own dark, ironic version of the poem, dealing with contamination by information (information waste) and the role of the ‘helpless observer’ who, like the ‘Angel of History’ in the well-known adage by Walter Benjamin, can only look at the debris piled by lived time without being able to intervene.

of Violence Heather Phillipson UK Premiere

United Kingdom 2017

Exhibition

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 The Main Guard

Agnieszka Polska (1985, Lublin, Poland) uses computer-generated media to focus on the individual and her social responsibility positioned in an intricate relationship between language, science and history. She attempts to describe the overwhelming ethical ambiguity of our time by poetic means; and the relationship between an individual and her surroundings by constantly shifting of the narrative through different scales. These melancholy journeys might depart from the laws of quantum mechanics, the female mouth, or an imperfect and fragile artifact, and soon reach the horror of catastrophes on a cosmic scale. The protagonists of her animated videos and films are often historical artists—those who left art or discredited their own role as an artist, like Lee Lozano, Charlotte Posenenske or Paweł Freisler. Polska’s videos take a hallucinatory form, composed largely of found, digitally manipulated images. Many of her works examine various processes of influence, legitimization or exclusion in the fields of language, consciousness and history. In order to describe these processes, she deliberately uses visual and acoustic stimuli to affect the viewer’s brain—in other words, that trigger a very physical feeling of being immersed in the material being watched. Polska lives in Krakow and Berlin, and studied at the University of the Arts in Berlin and Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Filmography: What the Sun Has Seen (2017), Ask the Siren (2017), My Little Planet (2016), The Bearer of Bad News (2015), The Talking Mountain (2015), Watery Rhymes (2014), I Am the Mouth (2014), Pistols (2014), Future Days (2013), Five Short Films (2012), The Sun (America) (2012), How the Work is Done (2011), The Garden (2011), My Favourite Things (2010), Sensitization to Colour (2009), The Forgetting of Proper Names (2009), Fire Cupping (2009), Correction Exercises (2008) Venue: Bankhill Ice House Bankhill Ice House, one of several known ice houses in Berwick, was built in the early 18th century. These buildings stored ice that was used for preserving salmon sent from Berwick to London and elsewhere on trade routes across the North Sea. Bankhill Ice House was still being used in the 1930s, and was designated an air raid shelter during WWII. Venue courtesy of Berwick Preservation Trust

5 mins

of Violence uses the structure of close-up pillow talk and casual camerawork to engage a dog in intimate digressions. The dog becomes an involuntary participant in human impositions— emotional, physical, linguistic and political. Co-commissioned by Film London and Channel 4 for Random Acts

World Festival Premiere Exhibition

Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, drawing, music, text and live events. Through collisions of image, noise, objects, language and bodies, Phillipson’s videos and sculptural installations behave as places, musical scores, poems and nervous systems. She has recently held solo shows at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Images Festival, Toronto and the 32nd Sao Paolo Biennale (all 2016). Her work was featured as part of Frieze New York’s Frieze Projects Programme (2016) and she has also produced moving image commissions for Channel 4 Television’s Random Acts strand and The Arts Council collection, as part of their 70th birthday celebrations. Phillipson is also an award-winning poet, with publications by Faber and Faber, Bloodaxe and Penned in the Margins, and was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014. Filmography: my name is lettie eggsyrub (2018), STATUS EPILEPTICUS (2018), everything slapped & candied & opening (2017), of Violence (2017), WHAT’S THE DAMAGE (2017), TRUE TO SIZE parts 1–7 (2016), 100% OTHER FIBRES parts 1–4 (2016), COMMISERATIONS! (2015), THE NYLON TRICOT HI-CUT ONE-PIECE (2015), FINAL DAYS (2015), SERIOUS TRACTION (2015), put the goat in the goat boat (2014), polyrhythmic swim-time in a bath of unspilled feelings (2013), Splashy Phasings (2013), ha!ah! (2013), Cardiovascular Vernacular (as in ‘it’s time for my regular cardiovascular vernacular’) (2013), immediately and for a short time balloons weapons too-tight clothing worries of all kinds (2013), Zero-Point Garbage Matte (2012), PRESSURIZATION (2012), Catastrophicephaleconomy (2012), Torso Portions (2012), A Is to D What E Is to H (2011), Well, this is embarrassing (2011), THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL (2011), Medico-Musico-Metaphysico (2011), (spaciously, away from surfaces with their hard, separate facts, looking at) A Mark on the Wall (2010) Heather Phillipson’s WHAT’S THE DAMAGE was screened in BFMAF 2017 Venue: The Main Guard The Main Guard dates from 1742. One of its three rooms is the ‘Black Hole’, a cell to hold the drunk and disorderly. The Main Guard is now used by Berwick Civic Society for meetings and as an exhibition space. Venue courtesy of Berwick Civic Society

Consensual Healing Carolyn Lazard United States 2018

14 mins

Fainting Spells Sky Hopinka World Festival Premiere

United States 2018

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 New Tower

Exhibition

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 Coxon’s Tower

A conversation between a therapist and their client unfolds as a yellow ball swings back and forth. Replicating simple animations of online EMDR videos used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Consensual Healing feeds Octavia Butler’s short story ‘Bloodchild’ through scripted therapeutic protocols, destabilising relations between coercion and consent, form and content, trauma and fiction.

Music by Juliana Huxtable; sound by Marco Gomez

Facilitator: Ok, I hear you. Let’s start over again.

Filmography: Consensual Healing (2018), CRIP TIME (2018), A Recipe for Disaster (2017), Get Well Soon (2015), Improved Techniques (2013)

Between the dizzying hallucinatory landscapes and circular images of a lens or porthole, Hopinka takes us to a world of dreams, spirits and myths, revealing the story of Xąwįska, the Indian Pipe Plant used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted. With abstracted and inverted images Hopinka moves from an editing station into the landscape, illuminating the sense of losing oneself, of fear and renewal. —Ruth Hodgins

Client: I’m having trouble remembering to be honest. Every time I try, I just see nothing, no image, but I remember how it felt. Facilitator: Ok, well, can you tell me? Client: Sure. I just remember feeling confused. I felt deeply loved and deeply mistreated at the same time. Facilitator: Ok. Why do think you felt that way. Client: Something changed in me. I was trying to navigate two different ways of seeing the world. It was a moment of transition. Facilitator: Even if you can’t remember the whole story, tell me the details you remember. 38

Carolyn Lazard (1987) is an artist working in video, sound, installation and performance. They have screened and exhibited work at Essex Street Gallery (New York), Anthology Film Archives (New York), The Kitchen (New York), New Museum (New York), Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio), Camden Arts Centre (UK), Kunsthal Aarhus (DE) and the Stedelijk Museum (NL). They have published writing in the Brooklyn Rail and Mousse Magazine. Lazard holds a BA from Bard college and lives in Philadelphia.

Venue: New Tower The late 15th century New Tower is accessed through a tunnel running through an earthwork built to to reinforce the medieval town walls. At the far end of the rectangular chamber are two gun ports for early breech-loading cannon. The triangular outside forms part of the late 18th century modifications of the walls. Thereafter it was used as a gunpowder store. (Jim Herbert) Venue courtesy of English Heritage

11 mins

European Premiere Exhibition

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, and Portland, Oregon and is currently based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigneous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, Antimatter, Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. Filmography: Fainting Spells (2018), Dislocation Blues (2017), Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017), I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016), Visions of an Island (2016), Jáaji Approx. (2015), Venite et Loquamur (2015), Kunįkaga Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcome Song (2014), wawa (2014) Sky Hopinka’s Dislocation Blues won the 2017 Berwick New Cinema Award and his film Visions of an Island was shown in an exhibition during BFMAF 2016 Venue: Coxon’s Tower Dating from the 14th century, Coxon’s Tower is part of the medieval fortifications started by Edward I in 1296. In the early 16th century, a stone bulwark, serving as a gun platform, was built out from the east casement. The ravages of the sea and river took their toll, and the bulwark was abandoned in the 17th century. Venue courtesy of English Heritage

The Magical State Sophia Al-Maria Colombia 2017

6 mins

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 The Magazine

Shot in Colombia, The Magical State depicts the possession of a Wayuu woman by a 40 million year old oil demon. Framed as an interrogation, an off-screen male voice challenges the woman, who gazes back directly into the viewer’s eyes, placing a curse on ‘man’, the species who have woken it from geological time. The violence of natural resource extraction—and the resulting violation of land rights—are reflected in the demon’s iridescentcoloured rage and stroboscopic movements. Part of Artist in Profile: Sophia Al-Maria (pages 48–52)

World Festival Premiere Exhibition

Sophia Al-Maria (1983) studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her first solo exhibition ‘Virgin with a Memory’ was presented at HOME, Manchester in 2014. AlMaria has also shown at the Whitney Museum, New York (2016); New Museum, New York (2015); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2013); Waqif Art Centre, Doha, Qatar (2007) and Townhouse Gallery Cairo (2005). Al Maria participated in the 2016 Biennale of moving images (BIM), organized by the centre d’art contemporain in Geneva. In 2015 she guest edited issue 8 of The Happy Hypocrite – Fresh Hell. Her memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth (2012) was published by Harper Perennial. Her writing has also appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Triple Canopy and Bidoun. Al-Maria is currently the writer-in-residence at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and will have solo exhibitions in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Tate Britain, London. Filmography: Not Really in Reality Reality TV (2018), Mirror Cookie (2018), Major Motions (2018), The Magical State (2017), Wayuu Creation Myth (2017), Spiral (Fatima Al Qadiri music video, 2017), Mothership (2017), Black Friday (2016), The Limerant Object (2016), The Future Was Desert Parts I-II (2016), The Litany (2016), Little Sister (2015), Sisters (2015), A Whale is a Whale is a Whale (2014), The Watchers 1–5 (2014), Class A (2014), Your Sister (2014), Evil Eye (2014), Choque (2014), Slaughter (2013), Schrodinger’s Girl (2013), Scout (2012) Venue: The Magazine The Magazine was built by the Board of Ordnance in 1749 to store the gunpowder used by the garrison stationed in the Barracks. The building is heavily buttressed to lessen the danger and impact of an explosion. Venue courtesy of English Heritage

How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? Rehana Zaman in collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers United Kingdom 2018

25 mins

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 Town Hall

How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from a Somali & Pakistani background. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind the scenes filming and archive footage of anti-racist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised. Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and supported by Tenderpixel, London

World Festival Premiere Exhibition

Rehana Zaman (1982, Heckmondwike, UK) lives and work in London. Working predominantly with the moving image, she is concerned with how individuals and groups relate and the effects of multiple social dynamics. Her narrative-based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. Zaman was awarded a British Council research grant with Museo de Art Carrillo Gil, Mexico City in 2015 and a Gasworks International Fellowship to Beirut in 2013. She was a LUX Associate Artist in 2012–13. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Serpentine Projects, London, UK (2018); CCA, Glasgow, UK (2018); Material Art Fair IV, Mexico City, Mexico (2017); Tenderpixel, London, UK (2016); The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2014); and Studio Voltaire, London, UK (2013). Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers are a collective of young filmmakers who came together to make films in October 2017. The collective is inspired by the work of anti-racist/womanist/feminist histories of Liverpool such as the Womens’ IndependenT Cinema House (Witch), Black Witch and Liverpool Black Media Group. Current members are Hannah, Muntaz and Yasmin. Filmography: Lourdes (2018), Tell me the story Of all these things (2017), Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena (2016), 5 (2014), Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014), I, I, I, I and I (2013), Netball (2013), What an artist dies in me/Exit the Emperor Nero (2013), Iron Maiden (Ambridge) (2011), Like an Iron Maiden Trapped Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2010) Rehana Zaman’s 5 was screened in BFMAF 2015 Venue: Town Hall Berwick Town Hall is at the east end of Marygate. Inside the Town Hall, the Council Chamber is used by the Borough Council, the Berwickupon-Tweed Guild of Freemen and Trustees. Above the entrance, two clock hands constantly point to 11 o’clock, this being the time at which Council Meetings used to be held. The present furnishings of the Chamber date from the reform of local government in 1974. Venue courtesy of The Freemen of Berwick

Carrs Down South Kevin Jerome Everson United States 2017

3 mins

The Hurt Goes On Berwick Youth Project International Premiere

United Kingdom 2018

World Premiere

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 18 Hide Hill

Exhibition

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 57 Marygate

Exhibition

Carrs Down South presents three generations of the Carr family waxing poetically about living and working in Salisbury, North Carolina. Kevin Jerome Everson’s brief portrait interrogates ideas of ambition, history and legacy.

(2014), Vanilla Cake with Strawberry Filling (2014), Blue Caps (2013), Charlie’s Proof (2013), The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), The Juneteenth Columbus, Mississippi (2013), The Release (2013), Rhinoceros (2013), Stone (2013), Stoplight Liberty (2013), U of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 1976 (2013), Workers Leaving the Job Site (2013), Century (2012), Chevelle (2012), Chicken (2012), Delivering Multiple Stings (2012), Early Riser (2012), Local 748L (2012), The Mayberry Practice Calf (2012), Rita Larson’s Boy (2012), Second Place (2012), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), The Wooden Calf (2012), Corn and Cotton (2011), The Equestrians (2011), Fifteen An Hour (2011), Half On, Half Off (2011), The Pritchard (2011), Quality Control (2011), Act One: Betty (2010), Act Two: Stop Drop Roll (2010), Act Three: Finale (2010), American Motor Company (2010), BZV (2010), Erie (2010), Fillmore (2010), House in the North Country (2010), 753 McPherson Street (2009), Around Oak Grove (2009), The Camps (2009), The Citizens (2009), Company Line (2009), Honorable Mention (2009), Lead (2009), Old Cat (2009), The Simple Antennae (2009), Telethon (2009), Watchworks (2009), 140 Over 90 (2008), Broad Day (2008), The Golden Age of Fish (2008), Home (2008), Ike (2008), Key to the Cities (2008), Ninety-Three (2008), O.T. (2008), Playing Dead (2008), Ring (2008), Second and Lee (2008), Undefeated (2008), The Wilbur (2008), Wolf Ticket (2008), According To... (2007), Emergency Needs (2007), Nectar (2007), Next to You (2007), North (2007), The Picnic (2007), The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin (2007), The Principles (2007), Something Else (2007), The Virginia Line-Up (2007), Cinnamon (2006), München, Raphaela (2006), Blind Huber (2005), Fifeville (2005), Memoir (2005), Spicebush (2005), Twenty Minutes (2005), Two-Week Vacation (2005), Aquarius (2003), Chemistry (2003), From Pompei to Xenia (2003), Pictures from Dorothy (2003), 72 (2002), Fumble (2002), Special Man (2002), Sportello Quattro (2002), Un Euro Venti Due (2002), Vanessa (2002), A Week in the Hole (2001), The Daily Number (2001), Pick Six (2001), Room Temperature (2001), Avenues (2000), Thermostat (2000), Imported (1999), Merger (1999), Second Shift (1999), Six Positions (1998), Eleven Eighty-Two (1997)

An analogue foray into a digital world.

In their own words:

Working with Newcastle-based moving image collective Film Bee, 15 young people from Berwick Youth Project have used collective reflection and DIY problem solving to create a series of provocations and installations about reality in a digitalised world, and how the value of images has changed with shifts in technology, particularly social media.

‘It’s really boring to be a teenager in Berwick and this project gave us the opportunity to try something totally different and learn about art in a new and interesting way. Working with the artists was really cool and we hope lots of people young and older will come and see our installation.’

Kevin Jerome Everson (1965) was born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio. He has a MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson was awarded the 2012 Alpert Award for Film/Video; his films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Glasgow Short Film Festival (2018); Harvard Film Archive (2018); Tate Modern (2017); Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul (2017); Viennale (2014); Visions du Reel, Nyon, Switzerland (2012), The Whitney Museum of American Art, N Y (2011) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2009). His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the upcoming Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA. Everson co-curated the 2018 Flaherty Seminar with writer/curator Greg DeCuir Jr. Filmography: Goddess (2018), Polly One (2018), Rhino (2018), Richland Blue (2018), Round Seven (2018), 70kg (2017), A Good Fight (2017), Brown and Clear (2017), Carrs Down South (2017), Fastest Man in the State (2017), How Can I Ever Be Late (2017), IFO (2017), Improvement Association (2017), Polly Two (2017), R-15 (2017), Rams 23 Blue Bears 21 (2017), Tonsler Park (2017), 8903 Empire (2016), Auditioning for Nathaniel (2016), Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), Eason (2016), Lost Nothing (2016), Oscar at 8903 Empire (2016), Shadeena (2016), Threshold Spondee/ Discrimination N66#1 (2016), We Demand (2016), Grand Finale (2015), It Seems to Hang On (2015), Park Lanes (2015), Production Material Handler (2015), Regal Unlimited (2015), Saturday Night in Mansfield Ohio (2015), Smooth Surface (2015), Three Items a Shelf (2015), Three Quarters (2015), The E-Z Touch Model 01191940 (2014), Fe26 (2014), Mansfield Product Company (2014), The New Wild Buckeye Explosion (2014), Ninety, NinetyFive (2014), Sound That (2014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014), Tygers

Berwick Youth Project provides youth clubs and bespoke activities to engage and support young people aged 13 to 18. The hub of all this activity is located at The Beehive, a purpose built youth facility. The moving image art work was made during a series of evening and summer holiday participatory sessions in collaboration with artists Mat, Christo and Leah from Film Bee. The young people also took a trip to Tate Modern in London during the summer holidays to meet the ARTIST ROOMS team, see work by artists Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas and Pablo Picasso, helping to inform the work they have produced.

Saturday 22 September, 2pm Join the young people and their friends in the exhibition for a Discovery Party and refreshments. All welcome. The Hurt Goes On was produced and created as part of ARTIST ROOMS Learning Programme and inspired by the work of artist Douglas Gordon, presented by Berwick Visual Arts at the Gymnasium Gallery in summer 2018 The ARTIST ROOMS programme is delivered by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate in partnership with Ferens Art Gallery until 2019, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, by Art Fund and by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland 43

Solvent Magazine Lucy Clout

Solvent Magazine Lizzie Homersham

United Kingdom 2018

Berwick Artists’ Moving Image Residency

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 10:00-17:00 The Gymnasium

Exhibition

It’s odd to write about it at this stage, hard to distinguish between what the work is and what it was going to be… I am on the edge of just telling anecdotes...1 1 Solvent Magazine would have to do with pleasure, production and reproduction, with domestic boundaries of privacy and pleasure. It came from a concern with the body as narrative, and provides a narrative body. One of the advantages of naming the concept of narrative diagnosis is that we may start to regard it as a positive outcome from a consultation, and possibly even a preferable one in many cases to the fetish of ‘the firm diagnosis’. 2 We discuss the use value of diagnosis in terms of its placement at the beginning of a narrative arc, as a response to a problem introduced through dialogue. We slotted as many of us as could fit on my uncle’s sofa: my mum, my aunt, my uncle, my other uncle, me and the extra-long cat stretched into a ginger question mark, his shaved patch revealing bare neck, reverse ruff. Auntie Joan was on FaceTime, aged 96, white hair and lilac sweater in a screen framed on our side by remote controls, iPhones, mugs of tea on coasters and flapjack chunks in plastic tubs, fake flowers resting sickly orange and peach on the base of the dead TV behind her. Since her cancer diagnosis she hadn’t wanted the doctors’ mortality predictions. She’d decided to keep going until spring equinox at least, pick the primroses and see what next. She had a box of morphine on the top shelf of the wardrobe at the ready, out of sight but not of reach. Her ‘box of heavenly delights’. This was November, and she’d have visitors another two months down the line, once she’d cleared her birthday. She’d retire from her history classes in the cold village hall. Uncle Bill would make her custard.

Lucy Clout presents a new body of work titled Solvent Magazine, including sculptural and video pieces made during her six-month residency with Berwick Visual Arts and BFMAF. An assemblage of parts that brings together research around close readings of bodies— diagnostic narratives, pleasure and ambiguity are used as ways to think about knowledge, evidence and queer reproduction. Part-waiting room, part-publishing house, Solvent Magazine presents: a £23.00 USB microscope camera, the story of a temp’s discretion, a new design for privacy screen glass which mimics the saliva of a person with secure attachment style, two piss coloured Perspex doors and a layer of plastic to keep out distractions.

Lucy Clout works primarily in video. She studied at Goldsmiths University, London, and The Royal College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Jerwood Space, London; CCA, Glasgow (2015) and Limoncello, London (2016). Recent screenings include Raven Row, Tate Britain and Anthology Film Archives, New York (all 2017). Lucy was awarded the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella award in 2015. Filmography: Solvent Magazine (2018), Warm Bath (2016), From Our Own Correspondent (2015), The Extra’s Ever-Moving Lips (2014), Shrugging Offing (2013), Untitled (2011) (2011), Manual Non Manual Manual (2010), 3 (buh buh buh) proposal for a collating machine (2008) Lucy Clout’s From Our Own Correspondent was screened in BFMAF 2015 Venue: Gymnasium Gallery Berwick Barracks was built in the early 18th century, designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. The Gymnasium was added to the complex in 1901. It has operated as a gallery since 1993, initially as a home for the Berwick Gymnasium Arts Fellowships and since 2013 by Berwick Visual Arts, who maintain a regular programme of exhibitions.

After the excesses of the festive period, Amanda is on hand to help clients flush away any toxins and waste matter from their bodies. She’s with 25-year-old fitness instructor Jody…3 Lucy: How blunt the segment is in its lack of definition between fat (warm living body) and shit (warm death)… As a teen I watched The Salon on hospital TV. In the colonic irrigation episode, turds sucked by in tubes like children whizzing down swimming pool flumes. The smell of chlorine on the ward dissolved into the set. Time passes quickly between only fearing pregnancy and confronting the idea of infertility. In August I asked how Bill and Joan were adjusting to having the diagnosis revoked. I wondered at their trust in the medical profession. They had a new ‘zest for life’ my mother told me, albeit mostly in the confines of their house. The problem had been chronic constipation.

Venue courtesy of Berwick Visual Arts and English Heritage

Friday 21 September, 10:30 Seminar: Lucy Clout Berwick Visual Arts and BFMAF Artist in Residence Lucy Clout discusses Solvent Magazine, her new body of work produced in Berwick and exhibited in The Gymnasium, with Cubitt Curatorial Fellow and Cinenova working group member Louise Shelley and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle.

2 When Solvent Magazine is still in flux I coin some terms: Anecdocracy: 1. A meritocracy of elevator pitches. Leadership on the basis of blue ticks and ability to assess a lift companion’s sensitivity, then trample on it; the leader remembers his time is worth more than that of his competitors, and that time is subject to manipulation. When the anecdote goes viral it has passed through every floor, eventually exceeding the shaft in terms of volume and visibility. 45

2. There are anecdotes that rely on no one having been around. There are bodies of circumstantial evidence. When she was temping at a law firm she sneezed during a nosebleed and spattered a box of photocopying. She left the office and the re-packed contents of the bloody box behind, originals in red, and grey in reproduction. Haneke is praised for his restraint, e.g. the singular blood spasm in Caché, but the temp knows true discretion. Autoschadenfreude: finding the means to laugh from within one’s own cycle of suffering. The bubble bursts like a sharp intrusion on an intimate scene. Remembering another term from 2008: Anhedonia: when I was unable to imagine Sisyphus happy I read from Charlie Brooker’s column and was briefly fascinated by his distinction between depression and anhedonia. Depression was some sort of active sadness, whereas anhedonia was a generalised loss of appetite as illustrated by George Romero’s Bruiser: when the jilted lover suffers a fate of having his facial features replaced by a smooth white mask, he loses touch with his desire. Lucy: 2008 was an odd time—men made a land grab for clinical depression in relation to humour. It was the beginning of the American comedy boom that gave Louis CK and Marc Maron the licence/rewards to publicly perform self-hatred, presenting that as an aphrodisiac to depressed women… Depressed internet white women are also quite 2008. Yes, nothingness and depression seem quite deeply the same, though I understand the desire to find a novel term for a long-held experience—‘depression’, ‘anhedonia’ or ‘comedian’—all tools for speaking. Comedy should talk to therapy. 4

3 Lucy’s work makes me laugh. In 3 (buh buh buh) proposal for a collating machine (2008), the artist considers three different sizes of the same model of machine, which she also embodies, step-tap, step-tapping its rotations around a square marked in grey tape on the floor, starting slowly and gathering pace. There’s boredom in her voice. Boredom of blue plastic buckets and the flimsy fabric of biodegradable food recycling bags. Beyond the repetitiousness and reliability of the machine, ‘there’s a lot more scope… within them, there is still potential for them, and that potential lies with a more public sphere…’—this is Lucy’s sales pitch and it fails to convince. She is unconvincing, as an artist-machine with potential. Because I’m not convinced, I laugh. Offering a story that is not aggrandised by a medical term can itself be a form of therapy, especially in a patient who is anxious about having a serious underlying condition. A good narrative diagnosis could also open the door to discussing all the aspects of the patient’s experience that might be closed down prematurely by medical labelling. To give an obvious example, calling someone’s transient low mood ‘depression’ may be less helpful than saying: ‘I can see and hear that your mood is low, but I’m really not sure why that is. Can you shed any light on it yourself?’ 5 One day I think depression has to do with expectation: when private, unarticulated expectations are not met, is one let down? Depression: sedimentation of being let down.

In the 19th c. the medical approaches to menopausal experience pertained to a theory of unblocking, as if the woman in question were suffering a kind of inner stagnation—George Sand, for example, was systematically lanced and bled by her doctor, to rid her of a persistent suffocating sensation, she told her sister in a letter. Windy climates could be advised, or light labour, to unblock the humours—gardening, wood sawing, walks and housework. It was suggested also that overheated salons should be avoided. 6 Within the opening minute of Lucy’s Warm Bath (2016) there is condensation and there is privacy glass, a melted assemblage of ampersands, rosebuds and treble clefs. I imagine the standing screens in Solvent Magazine drawing inspiration from the fern. There are visual similarities between slides of fertile saliva and the textured patterns of glass installed in bathrooms to protect their users’ modesty. A woman speaks to camera to share her personal tips for reading spit with the aid of an ovulation microscope, a small device with packaging that masquerades as lipstick. Each morning, first thing in the morning, she transfers a globule of spit from her pinkie to the lens. If the salt crystals in the fluid start ‘fully ferning… ferns like plants, that’s your peak fertility.’ She spreads her hands to demonstrate the ferning and her faith in this method. A video received as verbal description: Solvent Magazine would also contain a looping clip, a motif or pacer in which a woman leans in to kiss another, until a sneeze prevents their lips from meeting. Lizzie: They say sneezing is orgasmic don’t they? Lucy: Kids at school said that a sneeze was equivalent to a tenth of an orgasm, which seems like a very convenient decimal logic and also too little, like a sneeze is a lot and people would hurt themselves in the force of orgasming? Oh, did they mean pleasure or force? The sneeze appears like a force majeure clause, a natural disaster at the scale of the body. The time of waiting takes on a suspenseful quality. The negative space between the lips is an electrical circuit in which the unexpected inserts itself as a switch—within the loop, an interrupter.

1 ‘Affective viewing: Interview with Lucy Clout’, Shama Khanna, 2014: http://www.jerwoodvisualarts. org/writing-and-media/email-conversation-with-lucy-clout/ 2 John Launer, ‘Narrative diagnosis’, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 2012, Vol. 88, issue 1036, pp.

115–116. 3 ‘C4 LIVE Colonic Irrigation Colon Hydrotherapy on “The Salon” 2004 with Jody Bunting & Amanda Easton’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maPqILJOXf4 4 Memory of a dancer speaking during See Hear Here, a Movement Research ‘MELT’ workshop led by Mariana Valencia, for the expression of text through choreographic sensibilities. July 2017, Abrons Arts Centre, NYC. 5 John Launer, ibid. 6 Lisa Robertson, Proverbs of a She-Dandy, Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2018, p.

4 Lucy is surrounded by babies and ‘letdown’ is the expression of milk from the breast during feeding. From the luxury of her bath, Lisa Robertson takes the non-reproductive body on a noncircuitous walk. Some context preceding ‘Proverbs of a She-Dandy’:

Lizzie Homersham is a writer and editor living in London. Her writing has appeared in Art Monthly, A-or-ist, Art Papers, frieze and Rhizome, and in books such as Information (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art, 2016), and Objects of Feminism (KuvA, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2017). 47

Artist in Profile: Sophia Al-Maria Sophia Al-Maria’s practice incorporates diverse forms of visual art, writing and filmmaking—as shown in her ‘Temporal Vertigo’ screening, The Magical State exhibition and beyond. Time travel, genre cinema and visions of the apocalypse become fertile devices that propel Al-Maria’s distinctive works. Temporal Vertigo Saturday 22 September 16:15 (page 50) Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975) Saturday 22 September, 21:15 (page 82) Selected by Sophia-Al Maria, who will introduce the film Sophia Al-Maria Seminar Sunday 23 September 10:30 Sophia Al-Maria discusses her diverse practice— particularly the series of moving image works shown in the ‘Temporal Vertigo’ retrospective screening and The Magical State exhibition in The Magazine—with BFMAF associate programmer Herb Shellenberger and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle. Working at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art, Al-Maria’s practice occupies a singular space within the field of artists’ moving image. The Magical State Exhibition at The Magazine (page 40)

Artist in Profile: Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia Al-Maria: Temporal Vertigo Herb Shellenberger

46 mins Saturday 22 September, 16:15 Maltings Main House

Artist in Profile

Earth, you pretty thing. Let’s begin in the end, where the keys to the deep future are kept in your deep past.1 Alone on a hike in South Africa, a woman unexpectedly encounters a ten-thousand-year old rock painting which—upon sight—triggers an intense, corporeal experience of time-shock. The sediment of centuries unhinges; past, future and present assert their simultaneity, resulting in a sensation sharply felt in both mind and body that one could describe as ‘temporal vertigo’. Listening to Sophia Al-Maria relate this anecdote suddenly backgrounds the selection of eleven works she’s made over the past seven years that comprise this retrospective. To be sure, seven years is not a long time—some artists and filmmakers look across the expanse of seven decades of production in putting together a retrospective. But as I examined more closely the layers of Sophia Al-Maria’s very heterogeneous work, I started to understand that this retrospective doesn’t simply comprise films made since 2011, but rather contains acutely-felt explorations into the deep future and deep past. This vast expanse of time can boggle the mind and disturb the body; there is something deeply felt in the push-and-pull of perspective, form and focus throughout the artist’s quite varied films. The earliest work in the programme (How Can I Resist U?, 2011) is a music video for a track from Fatima Al Qadiri’s Genre-Specific Xperience EP. Both the track and video can be understood as a love letter to London, specifically the tradition of Khaleejis (Gulf Arabs) traveling there to experience the forbidden passions and excesses that, for them, the city represents: loud music, luxury cars and wavy nights fuelled by drugs, alcohol and sex. 2 Al-Maria uses low-resolution clips from YouTube and her quick, flashy editing enhances Al Qadiri’s raw, booming dubstep beats.

‘Temporal Vertigo’ is a wide-ranging selection of moving image work made by artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria over the last seven years. As schizophrenic in form as it is in chronology, the ten works shown move from essay film to music video, documentary, narrative, performance and all points in between. Included are the two part ‘Gulf Futurism’ essay film The Future Was Desert, which images the desert as a place outside of time; enigmatic sciencefiction/documentary hybrid Mothership; and two music videos for Fatima Al Qadiri. This program represents the first retrospective screening of Al-Maria’s formally rigorous and beautifully cinematic work, providing a view of visual and thematic cross-contaminations between many different projects.

Slaughter, 2013, Egypt, 6’ Rushes of the 2012 Eid al-Adha slaughter shot for the climax of the abandoned feature film Beretta

The Future Was Desert (Part I), 2016, UK, 5’ ‘Mankind’s days are numbered, all their activities will be nothing but wind’ —Sumerian proverb

Not Really in Reality Reality TV, 2018, UK, 4’ A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a ‘love goddess’ and speaking on the subject of vengefulness

Fatima Al Qadiri: How Can I Resist U?, 2011, UK, 4’ Qatari Supercars on Edgeware Road / London towerblocks / and so much Gulfie Arab donk

Wayuu Creation Myth, 2017, Colombia, 4’ A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony

Choque, 2014, Qatar/Brazil, 5’ FIFA Qatar and FIFA Brazil all mixed together

The Future Was Desert (Part II), 2016, UK, 5’ ‘Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time’ —J.G. Ballard

Mothership, 2017, Qatar/UK, 3’ A baby bird moves in the sand, watched by a mysterious stranger D0ved0wn, 3’ Though only the recipient can fully decode this video love letter, it is general enough to be read as a universal love poem Fatima Al Qadiri: Spiral ft. Bobo Secret, 2017, UK, 5’ A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form

Choque (2014) also has a booming soundtrack of beats and automobile motors, but this documentary video shot in the Middle East and South America has an entirely different focus from How Can I Resist U?. Choque seamlessly threads together two massive public events that Al-Maria shot herself: celebrations in Doha during December 2010, following the announcement that Qatar would host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, as well as the massive protests in Rio de Janeiro of the 2014 World Cup. Close-ups of jubilant Qatari football fans and enraged Brazilian protestors alternate swiftly, so the viewer must determine whether she is seeing rabid joy or fierce consternation in the eyes of those onscreen. This same sense of intensity and unease is transmitted to viewers of Slaughter (2013). Originally shot in 2012 during the production of Beretta, a narrative feature film that Al-Maria was forced to abandon production on, Slaughter comprises documentary footage of the Eid el Adha slaughter, intended as the background of the film’s climax. The quite literally visceral film shows animals being prepared for the sacrifice, killed, cleaned and butchered, all underneath a loud electronic soundtrack. The precariousness of life is also at the beating heart of Mothership (2017), in which a young Mynah bird wriggles on the ground after falling out of its nest. The brief vignette, shot at the bottom of a massive sinkhole, is drama in miniature which also reaches astronomical proportions. The hatchling is soon visited by ‘a shadow visitor: time—the terror of all creatures’. 3 D0ved0wn also circles around the cosmic and the avian. A personal video which Sophia Al-Maria has shared for this programme, it is a love-essay delivered to an undisclosed recipient. Filled with secret references and clues that only the recipient can decode, the video is general enough to be understood as a universal love poem. ‘Do you remember that dove that smashed into our window? The death left an imprint on the glass, in a tiny galaxy of dust’. Digital galaxies commingle and collide as the artist passionately reads an earnest, searching letter to her beloved. The animated dust and swirling stars eventually resolve into a new dove which takes flight, reconstituted from these interstellar materials into a being whole once again.

Spiral (2017), the artist’s second music video for Fatima Al Qadiri, again mixes fantasy with reality. Taking inspiration from a belly dancing scene in the Egyptian comedy Ayazon (2008, ‫)نظيأ‬, which went viral and became a queer proclamation of joy and defiance, Spiral features performers Zadiel Samsaz and Eli El Sultan belly dancing in femme and masc identities, a vaguely-implied competition pitted between the two. The sumptuous black-and-white cinematography and Al-Maria’s signature editing style elegantly draw in the viewer, but the interviews with the performers during the extended credits of the film transform what could otherwise be a standard performance video into a document of lived experience, a vibrant history that comes alive even from the short anecdotes we hear from each.

Enceindre Luke Fowler United Kingdom, Spain

2018

30 mins

Saturday 22 September, 19:45 Maltings Main House

World Premiere Festival Commission

A central work in Sophia Al-Maria’s 2018 exhibition ‘ilysm’ at London’s Project Native Informant, Not Really in Reality Reality TV (2018) stars Bai Ling, a Chinese-American actress known for her roles in films like The Crow (1994), Wild Wild West (1999) and Crank: High Voltage (2009). In an interview for the latter film, Bai stated ‘I’m not really in reality. I’m in my own universe and my mind is a million miles somewhere else’. 4 This tension between reality and the entertainment industry is at the heart of what Al-Maria’s suite of works made for ‘ilysm’, Not Really in Reality in particular. Prompted by questions from the artist—who is shown reflected in a mirror—Bai sprouts seemingly earnest yet brilliantly seductive wisdom, making the viewer nod in agreement while also wondering whether Bai is playing a character. Her shirt is covered in black-and-white sequins which spell out the word GOD. Al-Maria regularly utilizes the interview or conversation format in her videos, and The Magical State takes the form of an interrogation. Shot in Colombia with Wayuu performer Ziruma Morales, the film begins with a male voice off-screen harshly interrogating the woman, creating a scenario recalling Joan of Arc on trial. He speaks in Spanish—the coloniser’s tongue—while she responds in her indigenous Wayuunaiki language. The woman is possessed by a forty-million-year old oil demon, and responds with venom and invective, cursing ‘man’ who have wrought such destruction on her land. There are implicit parallels drawn between the greed of oil developers in South America and the Middle East, but particularly in the case of the Wayuu people whose land rights have been repeatedly infringed upon by drilling and mining interests. In Wayuu Creation Myth (2017), a companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma explains the Wayuu cosmogony, a particularly fantastic and bloody myth which relates to the strong presence of women in their matrilineal society. Finally, The Future Was Desert (2016) is a two-part essay film, using archival film clips, an array of digital images and an assemblage of texts to meditate on the similarities between the future and the past, ‘when the Sahara was the savannah, and the Gulf, a garden‘. Cave drawings or ancient artefacts can on the one hand be interpreted as old and stagnant, but in another—perhaps more accurate—sense, they are bona fide time travellers, zooming at warp speed twenty-seven thousand years in time until an archaeologist uncovers them. But The Future Was Desert’s apocalyptic visions of Neolithic statues and futuristic dunes-asruins are not all completely stone-faced: Boney M’s Atomic Age disco anthem ‘We Kill the World’ echoes across the corridors of eternity, a fittingly blissful soundtrack to the deep time montage of every last person, animal and object being ground to dust across the infinite sands of time. …And when the tectonic plates see to the sky and wrench the stars down to Earth like a bright, wide shroud, we will join hands and let the desert of the future—and the desert of the past—close around us, in the manner of a dream.5 1 The opening narration to Sophia Al-Maria’s The Future Was Desert (Part I), 2016 2 Perhaps an amped-up version of the Amish rite of rumspringa, when youth leave their confined community and sometimes imbibe in earthly pleasures strictly forbidden by societal rules. 3 ‘Fog of Fogs, Blog of Blogs’, Sophia Al-Maria, 2014: https://sophiaalmaria.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/ fog-of-fogs-blog-of-blogs/ 4 ‘Bai Ling cranks up moonstruck life for High Voltage’, Alex Dobuzinskis, Reuters, https://www.reuters. com/article/us-bai/bai-ling-cranks-up-moonstruck-life-for-high-voltage-idUSTRE53H15Y20090418 5 The closing narration to Sophia Al-Maria’s The Future Was Desert (Part II), 2016

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival presents the premiere of Enceindre, a new commission and first collaboration between artist filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain. If fortifications are considered ‘the body of the place’, what does it means to live in a body that is outside of time and without purpose? Could these fortress towns be considered hetrotopias? Or are they, as the writer WG Sebald vividly describes, alien structures denuded from human history? Enceindre adopts an infra-sensitive approach to place, drawing on unheard acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic landscapes. The film’s world premiere at BFMAF 2018 will be immediately followed by a ‘dark cinema’ version of the film with an alternative soundtrack diffused live by Chris Watson.

Luke Fowler is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. His work explores the limits and conventions of biographical and documentary filmmaking, and has often been compared to the British Free Cinema of the 1950s. Working with archival footage, photography and sound, Fowler’s filmic montages create portraits of intriguing, counter cultural figures, including Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing and English composer Cornelius Cardew. Chris Watson is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, and for Touch he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. The unearthly groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of, in Watson’s words, putting a microphone where you can’t put your ears. He was born in Sheffield and in 1971 became a founding member of the influential Sheffield-based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire. His sound recording career began in 1981 when he joined Tyne Tees Television. Since then he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres from around the world. As a freelance recordist for film, tv & radio, Chris Watson specialises in natural history and documentary location sound together with track assembly and sound design in post production. Filmography: Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett) (2017), Country Grammar (with Sue Tompkins) (2017), For Christian (2016), Depositions (2014), To The Editor Of Amateur Photographer (with Mark Fell, 2014), The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott (2012), All Divided Selves (2011), A Grammar for Listening, Parts 1–3 (2009), David (2009), Anna (2009), Lester (2009), Helen (2009), George (2008), Bogman Palmjaguar (2008), An Abbeyview Film (2008), Paddington Collaboration (2007), Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), The Way Out (2003), What You See is Where You’re At (2001) Luke Fowler’s Bogman Palmjaguar was screened in BFMAF 2016

Commission supported by LUMA Foundation, Outset Scotland and Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council 52

Luke Fowler’s Enceindre: fortification as heterotopia

Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

François Bonnet

I am writing this piece from a fortified island. At strategic points, ramparts have been erected. The isle’s capital still bears extensive witness to the 17th century military architecture of the celebrated French engineer Vauban. Later, the coasts were seeded with bunkers and riddled with Rommel’s viewing-posts from World War II. If most of those protective ramparts have already disappeared, the surviving small forts in reinforced concrete weaken and disintegrate, their noses plunged into the sands which have, since then, drawn backwards. The fortification, the strong place, possesses a distinctive resonance. As the writings of Carl von Clausewitz tell us, the fortress embodies the double function of protection of a place (and all that it contains: weapons, garrison and population) whilst equally standing as an area of strategic, economic and symbolic influence, well beyond the scope of its cannons. Thus, its aura is split between the time of its functional existence and the very much longer time of its residual existence. One of the properties of fortifications is to last well beyond their obsolescence, so long as they are not razed to the ground. But what still exists within their interior enclosure, those which still define the design of the towns, still impose on them their routes, their turns, their obstacles, but offer nothing in exchange? What do these siege-like heterotopias mean to us? In as much as they are heterotopias—i.e. spaces without any usage—they are equally opened up to reinvention, to a redeployment of their force, their stockpiled power and limitlessness which threatens to disappear under erosion, to disguise itself under the grass and the soil and become wiped out by the pressure of urbanism. By the impossibility of being destroyed straightaway, the fortifications—along with all ruins— incite one to contemplate them, to enquire into and consider them. It’s not a question of detecting historical events and putting them into a chronological order, a narrative. On the contrary, it is a matter of making space for them, of incorporating them into the here and now and grasping them as hybrid objects whose care for them makes us see and listen to their territory. This is what is at stake in Luke Fowler’s film. Whilst everything must contain signifiers for us, this film takes on the role of revealing to us what has become invisible, but yet has also still not ceased to be present. Thus, it helps us to represent this layered world, fascinating by its disparate traces and sensations. After all, it is in this sole depth of the world that we find the living world.

François Bonnet (1981) is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theoretician. Based in Paris, he is Head of Ina GRM and author of The Order of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago and The InfraWorld. 54

In Focus: Los Otros The first major UK retrospective of filmmakers Shireen Seno and John Torres, whose studio, film laboratory, library and platform Los Otros is one of the most invigorating forces in Philippine cinema today. Years When I Was a Child Outside (John Torres) Thursday 20 September, 15:45 (page 60) Big Boy (Shireen Seno) Friday 21 September, 10:30 (page 61) Seminar: Los Otros Saturday 22 September, 10:30 In this seminar, Shireen Seno and John Torres will explore Los Otros’ history and the surrounding context and community of artists and filmmakers both in the Philippines and internationally. They will also discuss their working methods and strategies for production, and will be joined by Richard Bolisay, Viknesh Kobinthan and 2018 seminar leader Taylor Le Melle. Lukas the Strange (John Torres) Sunday 23 September, 11:45 (page 62) Nervous Translation (Shireen Seno) Sunday 23 September, 20:00 (page 7)

We are grateful to film critic Richard Bolisay and curator Viknesh Kobinthan, who will moderate the Los Otros retrospective screenings and seminar. Richard Bolisay is a writer and film critic based in Manila. His essays on cinema have appeared in various publications online and in print. He is a participant of the Berlinale Talent Press and Locarno Critics Academy, and has been part of the jury of the Hong Kong International Film Festival, QCinema International Film Festival and Cinema One Originals Film Festival. Viknesh Kobinathan is a freelance curator from Singapore. He was the programme manager at Singapore’s only independent cinema, The Projector. In February 2018, he curated ‘Witness to War: Memories and Screens’, a film programme made in response to the 75th anniversary of the Pacific War presented by the National Museum of Singapore and the Asian Film Archive. At present he contributes to the Singapore International Film Festival as a writer and consultant. Viknesh is currently based in the UK, pursuing a postgraduate degree in film curation at the National Film and Television School.

Richard Bolisay

It is a story that begins with a man on an island, in a little, busy hub in Quezon City called Katipunan. Sometime in 2003, several years after graduating from college, John Torres is renting a space for his post-production work, conveniently located next to a huge university. Over time, seeing the mix of people from diverse ages and backgrounds coming by, he would hold screenings of short films, experimental works, and moving images in this tiny studio. Eventually he would meet the critic Alexis Tioseco, who would have a huge impact on his life and career, as well as filmmakers Raya Martin, Khavn dela Cruz, Rox Lee, Sherad Anthony Sanchez, and Lav Diaz, some of the key figures in Philippine independent cinema. This is where the seed of John’s artistic career would start budding, where he would shoot his first three short films—Tawidgutom, Salat, and Kung Paano Kita Liligawan Nang ‘Di Kumakapit sa Iyo?—the moment in which his relationship with cinema would become more defined, more intimate. This joint in Katipunan is called Los Otros. Around six years later, in 2009, John would meet the photographer Shireen Seno. Born into Filipino parents, she has grown up in Japan and studied in Canada, and has seen his films and been impressed with them. Their relationship would go beyond creative—Shireen would be part of his small crew, while John would later on edit and produce her films—and towards romantic. As their feelings for each other grow, she would decide to settle down in the Philippines. Los Otros, never gone but always in the periphery, would find its second home in their house in Teacher’s Village in Quezon City, a tricycle ride away from its birthplace. The film screenings would continue in their small garage, with good mates and neighbours as their audience, but there are new faces as well, acquaintances quickly becoming friends. It’s back to basics, but the basics have always been the most important. They would clear out their first floor to make room for a larger studio space, where workshops can be organised and more people can gather around. Before the birth of their daughter Aki in 2018, Los Otros would be John and Shireen’s first offspring, their love child. On its website, Los Otros is described as ‘a Manila-based space, film lab, and platform committed to the intersections of film and art, with a focus on process over product’. John and Shireen have always emphasised this explorable space between cinema and art, how the moving image connects with the fringes of various methods of expression, how a young art such as film can walk through time and history through a community of people who keep discovering different ways of seeing and feeling. In the beginning, they would screen films by friends and their own, as well as works of pioneering independent Filipino filmmakers from the 1980s and 1990s, providing an appropriate venue for these small films that merit lengthy discussions over beer. Dialogue between the audience and the makers is a key element of its exploration, the process through which art gains relevance. But as they have strongly built their networks locally and internationally—especially through friendships forged in foreign festivals to which their works are invited—John and Shireen, particularly from 2013 onwards, would begin inviting practitioners from outside the country. Some of these visits include the artist Takahiko Iimura, with a

16mm film performance of Circle and Square, in which ‘a loop of 16mm black film is suspended by two 100 feet spools on the ceiling and running through the projector’; the artist Lee Jangwook, with a multi-projection performance that explores ‘multi-layered memories on landscape’ and a two-day workshop on 16mm handmade film, teaching participants about cameraless filmmaking (painting, scratching, and taping) as well as hand printing, photograms, and processing; and the curator George Clark, with an illustrated talk on films, maps and gardening titled ‘On the Planters Art’, drawing on a range of sources from Gilles Deleuze and Jorge Luis Borges to Law Kar, Raúl Ruiz, and Hugo Santiago. Over the years Los Otros has also hosted a series of screenings and talks, an eclectic selection of films and moving images that introduces Filipino audiences to faraway worlds and fresh perspectives. These include ‘Embedded South(s)’, a showcase of works by 29 artists from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, geographies labelled as ‘south’ by scholars owing to their socio-economic situations as well as experiences of colonialism, diaspora, and forced labour; short films from the International Film Festival Rotterdam followed by an illustrated talk by programmer Julian Ross titled ‘Between Stillness and Motion: The Afterlife of the 35mm Carousel Slide Projector’; the video-essay trilogy of South Korean artist Haegue Yang consisting of Unfolding Places, Restrained Courage, and Squandering Negative Spaces; short films from Bolivia as well as the first feature of Miguel Hari titled The Corral and the Wind; a screening of Come to Me Paradise by Filipino-Canadian artist Stephanie Comilang; and works by Julia Feyrer and Oliver Husain, two artists currently working in Canada. These collaborations with international artists are complemented by Los Otros’s continued support of initiatives from the local scene, including ‘The Kalampag Tracking Agency: 30 Years of Experimental Film & Video from the Philippines’, an ongoing screening initiative curated by Merv Espina and Shireen, and ‘Rising Indies! Tokyo-Manila: 4 Days of Experimental & Alternative Cinema from Japan + The Philippines’. Los Otros has also worked with activist and filmmaker Kiri Dalena for her Northern Mindanao Documentary Production Workshop and RESBAK (Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings). In addition to being part of the collective Tito & Tita, which they fondly regard as Los Otros’s close cousin, John and Shireen themselves would occasionally conduct directing and documentary workshops and help other filmmakers produce their works. This emphasis on John and Shireen’s social engagements, as much as it informs the kind of artists they are and the inclinations of their art, should not in any way diminish the attention that their own films deserve. On the contrary, it should enrich them. Their films are often described as highly personal, sometimes difficult to enter (and also difficult to exit), buoyed by an intimacy and consciousness that comes from a very specific ethos and experience of the Filipino. On one hand, this is true: they exist in the realm of an identifiable race and culture, the myths and memories of home, the illusions and allusions of time. But on the other, in their efforts to impart a distinct array of spectacles and sensations, their films sometimes

go completely beyond the self and towards the the many forms of other and connections are no longer as clear as they are supposed, which makes sense in any discourse of involvement in relation to time and memory. The progression of John’s feature films—Todo Todo Teros (2006), Years When I Was a Child Outside (2008), Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (2010), Lukas the Strange (2013), and People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016)—can be seen as a movement that may not be necessarily horizontal (inwards, perhaps?) but one that always tries to visit unchartered territories, each film more persistent in finding a way to express the unexpressed. Todo Todo Teros and People Power Bombshell, for instance, can be viewed from the opposite ends of a spectrum, i.e. it is impossible to compare them because of how completely different they are, yet they can come only from the same mind and soul. The ten years between them has made apparent the required journey for any complex discovery. Shireen’s Big Boy (2011) and Nervous Translation (2017) are more specific to recollections of childhood. Having seen both films, one can point out the softness, the tenderness that characterises her direction which veers away from the convenience of evoking nostalgia and goes toward a reflexive intimation of the past that exists on the same plane as the present and future. John’s influence on Shireen’s films is recognisable, but Shireen’s voice, the way her narratives make use of silence and spaces, the manner in which the whole is felt in only a few seconds, is hers alone. Her experience in photography informs the denseness of her images, the look of which bears the transportive and magnetic quality of her storytelling. Los Otros has predated the boom of Philippine independent cinema in the mid-2000s, a time when film production has reached an inspiring peak with the variety of filmmakers using the accessibility of digital technology to explore subjects traditionally considered unfit for cinema. People who have lived through that time will remember it with fondness—the joy of rebellion, the thrill of solidarity, the taste of liberation, genuinely experienced. More than a decade later, many things have changed. The Philippine independent cinema has reached a plateau, so to speak, but independence has always meant struggle. Freedom has always come with challenges. Perhaps fewer than a thousand know what Los Otros does, or have been to its events, or have seen John and Shireen’s films. But it does not matter. Los Otros has always been evolving and adapting to changes. And like its parents it is happy to hang around and make small waves.

Years When I Was a Child Outside John Torres

Big Boy Shireen Seno

Philippines 2008

Philippines 2012

100 mins

Thursday 20 September, 15:45 Maltings Henry Travers

Years When I Was a Child Outside is a meta-film following Torres’ perspective as the son of bestselling self-help author Rodolfo Torres, whose instructional books and tapes made in early 1980s Philippines aimed to ‘help raise brighter children’. Upon learning that his father bore illegitimate children, the narrator decides to run away. The film is not only a chronicle of stories through foreign regions but also a probing letter from outside circles; an honest account of illegitimate views from uneven terrain; and a narrative-driven exploration of the nooks and peripheries of the body, geography and weather. As the journey progresses, the film increasingly traverses the countries of revelation, film, and heart—to where all journeys are meant to end with. Q&A with filmmaker John Torres

Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

John Torres is an independent filmmaker, musician and writer. He has made more than a dozen short films and five features, including Todo Todo Teros (2006), Years When I Was a Child Outside (2008), and Lukas the Strange (2013). His work fictionalizes and reworks personal and found documentations of love, family relations and memory in relation to current events, hearsay, myth and folklore. His latest work, People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016), is a film composed of decaying 35mm footage of an unfinished film from the 80s, mixed with new footage and sound interviews of the original cast, edited to sound like dialogue in a documentary that tells of their whole ordeal of making a film at the hands of a prominent Filipino director. John teaches parttime at the Ateneo de Manila University. He conducts filmmaking workshops and co-organizes artist talks and screenings in Los Otros. He is currently in the studio to record new material for his band Taggu nDios. Filmography: People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose (2016), Lukas the Strange (Lukas nino, 2013), Mapang-akit (2011), Muse (2011), Silent Film (2011), Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (Ang ninanais, 2010), We Don’t Care About Democracy. This Is What We Want: Love, Hope and Its Many Faces (Wala kaming pakialam sa demokrasya. Ang gusto namin: pag-ibig, pag-asa at ang kamukha nito, 2010), Very Specific Things at Night (2009), Hai, They Recycle Heartbreaks in Tokyo so Nothing’s Wasted (2009), Years When I Was a Child Outside (Taon noong ako’y anak sa labas, 2008), Voice, Tilted Screens and Extended Scenes of Loneliness (2007), The Night When Father Told Me He Had a Child Outside (Gabi noong sinabi ng ama kong may anak siya sa labas, 2006), Salat (2005), How I Can Court You Without Holding You (Kung paano kita liligawan nang di kumakapit sa iyo, 2005), Tawidgutom (2005), Tawidgutom (2004), Salat (2004) John Torres’ People Power Bombshell: The Diary of Vietnam Rose was screened in BFMAF 2017

89 mins

Friday 21 September, 10:30 Maltings Main House

America has ‘liberated’ the Philippines and the islands have just been proclaimed a new republic. Every morning, at the crack of dawn, Father and Mother stretch Julio, pulling his limbs in opposite directions. They make him drink a concoction made from the liver of codfish, believed to stimulate growth in children. He stands in the blazing heat of the sun. The family swells in size to six children. Father hunts for food while Mother tends to domestic duties, leaving Julio and his siblings alone, exposed to their lush natural environs. Soon enough, the youngest two are taken away and distributed amongst the two aunts without offspring of their own.

Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

Big Boy chronicles the growth of a family, the myths of progress that consume them and the violence not just in war and colonization, but also that which is inherent in coming into being—for a boy, a man and a nation. Q&A with filmmaker Shireen Seno

Lukas the Strange John Torres Philippines 2013

Screening the Forest

85 mins

Sunday 23 September, 11:45 Maltings Main House

Filmmakers in Focus: Los Otros

Curated by Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn, this series takes nature as its point of departure. ‘Screening the Forest’ weaves together forests from Japan, Myanmar, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and the Philippines, understanding the forest to be a network of living beings where agency distributes beyond human forms of life. Sensory, colourful and widescreen, the forest is naturally cinematic. ‘Screening the Forest’ is supported by the British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships Programme under the UK Government’s Rutherford Fund, and organised in collaboration with the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn graduated from the PhD programme at Queen Mary, University of London. His PhD project explores the potential of the forest in cinema as a space that reveals the post-anthropocentric perspective to the world. Graiwoot was recently awarded the British Academy’s Visiting Fellowship for his project ‘Southeast Asian Cinema and the Anthropocene’. His host institution is CREAM, University of Westminster.

Forest Experimenta Thursday 20 September, 11:30 (pages 66-73) Jîn Friday 21 September, 19:15 (page 74) Blood Amber Saturday 22 September, 16:30 (page 75) Genpin Sunday 23 September, 15:45 (page 76) Worldly Desires Sunday 23 September, 17:45 (page 77)

‘Lukas, in the middle of the film, the actress will pay a visit. You’ll fall in love with her. And you’ll understand your father. I’ll become your memory. I haven’t shown you the middle yet’. Thus begins John Torres’s latest dream of a documentary, a highly experimental, gloriously free-form coming-of-age story. Shortly after the arrival of a film crew that throws his tiny, usually quiet village into a frenzy of commotion, Lukas’s father, Mang Basilio, announces that he is a ‘tikbalang’, the half-horse, half-man of Filipino folklore. When Mang Basilio disappears, the awkward, baffled Lukas sets out on a journey of self-discovery that will include a ‘river of forgetting’, invisible voices and a hallucinatory blurring of reality and fantasy. Torres has already carved out an idiosyncratic niche for himself in the thriving world of documentary-fiction hybrids, and this is his most personal and expansive work to date. — Film Society of Lincoln Center

Screening the Forest Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn

Sensory, colourful and displayed in widescreen: the forest is already naturally cinematic. Since the turn of this century, the forest has become a site of creative exploration for contemporary art filmmakers in Asia. Curating a programme of Asian cinema usually ends up with a selection of films grouped according to the supposed importance of their auteurs and to the identity and history of each nation. ‘Screening the Forest’ takes nature as a point of departure. By placing the forest at the centre of a curatorial practice, we emphasize that cinema is constructed not only culturally and aesthetically but also naturally. The first edition of ‘Screening the Forest’ took place in 2014, when I curated a short film programme as a part of my PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London. In 2016, a revision of that programme was shown in Paris’s Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. The major expansion of the programme, however, happened in early 2018 when Singapore’s Asian Film Archive invited me to curate five film programmes about forests in Asia. After the successful screening in Singapore, I decided to take the programme on tour, revising some choices of films in order to reflect the theme of my current research. Thanks to the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, the new edition of ‘Screening the Forest’ now arrives in Berwick-upon-Tweed. This new programme weaves together the cinematic forests of Japan, Myanmar, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam and the Philippines. (In some cases, the forest refers to nothing but a world construed in its own territory.) It includes eight short moving image works, one medium-length film and three features. The programme includes the work of some worldrenowned film directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), Naomi Kawase (Japan) and Reha Erdem (Turkey), who have each made many films in the forest. At the same time, I also chose several works by experienced video artists in Asia in order to show a variety of themes and strategies each artist adopts. Why does the forest matter? And in what ways does the forest relate to cinema? In answering these questions here, I want to share a few ideas behind the curatorial decision, a trail of breadcrumbs that will enticingly lead the audience to go deeper into the beauty and depths of the forest. First, what I discovered in many artists’ films from Asia (and beyond) is that the artists take the forest not as a lifeless background for human stories, but more as a living being. In many films, the forest moves, shares and communicates. This idea coincides with the animistic quality in a cinematic medium. Since its inception, cinema has been an art form that acknowledges nonhuman agency, including trees, wind and water. The idea of the forest as a living being also corresponds with the ecological challenge that the earth is facing today, an idea which suggests that we are in the Anthropocene—the epoch in which humans’ impact on the earth system is calling us to rethink the political and ethical relationship between humans and the earth, and especially the forest.

Reflecting with these ideas, many of the films in the programme present the forest as a nonhuman witness—or a breathing archive—of traumatic political-ecological history. Jet Leyco’s Not a Soul shows the co-existence of human and nonhuman history in the Filipino forest, a place that once was a battle zone. In Landscape Series #1, Nguyễn Trinh Thi depicts Vietnamese men and women pointing fingers at the forest, as if it hides a secret. In Kamjorn Sankwan and Invalid Throne, Thai filmmaking duo Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Kamjorn Sankwan tell an autobiographical story of a man witnessing the change of the forest in his village. The two films mirror each other—one is a digital documentary, the other fictional and presented with 35mm projection. In many films the forest may look sublime at a first glance, but these films divert from that romantic depiction. Jîn starts with a stunning image of the forest in Turkey. But the film slowly becomes a metaphor for humans and the earth, specifically the war that humans perpetuate on the earth. Blood Amber presents the forest’s dual functions—a commoditized space for the miners who search for the amber underground as well as a battlefield in a larger warzone between an ethnic group and the Burmese state. Both Invalid Throne and Blood Amber also provoke us to think that the elements under the ground are also parts of the jungle. There is also a layer of self-reflexivity in the sense that many films in the programme are also about filmmakers making films in the forest. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Worldly Desires and Pimpaka Towira’s Trailer of the 20th Thai Short Film and Video Festival record loving memories of film crews deep in the jungle, while The Legend in the Mist puts together a montage of forest spectacles from classic martial art films. The notion of the forest as a creative and liberal space also carries on in Super Taboo, a film that pays tribute to a creative force which resists the censorship regime. While many films in the programme were made by a film crew, some films, including Not a Soul, Blood Amber, Genpin and The Breath resulted from a one-to-one experience between a filmmaker and the environment, since the director shot the film by him/herself. Finally and importantly, many films are about life, humans and beyond. While Genpin updates a myth that the forest is the origin of life by observing women who prepare their bodies to give birth naturally at a clinic in the middle of a hill, The Breath focuses on a basic sign of life— breathing, as the filmmaker walks into the forest and shares the air with other beings in the living system. In this silent film, we will hear viewers breathing as well. ‘Screening the Forest’ is supported by the British Academy’s Visiting Fellowships Programme under the UK Government’s Rutherford Fund, and organised in collaboration with the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster.

Trailer of the 20th Thai Short Film and Video Festival Pimpaka Towira

Not a Soul Jet Leyco

Thailand

UK Premiere

Philippines

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

2016

2 mins

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

Every year, the Thai Short Film and Video Festival invites a Thai filmmaker to make a trailer for the festival. For the 2016 edition, the invitee is Pimpaka Towira, a veteran filmmaker who recently returned to the film scene with her well-received feature The Island Funeral. In the past, Pimpaka has made several films set in the forest, and this self-reflexive, humorous trailer reflects the experience of dealing with nature.

Pimpaka Towira (1967, Thailand) graduated from Thammasat University, Thailand. Her feature film debut One Night Husband (2003) premiered in the Berlinale and established Towira as the first female Thai filmmaker to be noticed by international viewers and critics. Towira writes, directs and produces all of her films. She has been invited as a jury member for many film festivals and won the Silpathorn Award in 2009, distributed by the Ministry of Culture in Thailand. In 2010, her short film Por (My Father) won the Special Jury Award at the Pacific Meridian IFF, after which she made two other acclaimed shorts, Terribly Happy (2010) and Mother (2012). Her second feature The Island Funeral (2015) was awarded the Asian Future Best Film Award at Tokyo IFF and received the FIPRESCI Award at the Hong Kong IFF. Filmography: Prelude to the General (2016), Trailer of the 20th Thai Short Film and Video Festival (2016), The Island Funeral (Mahut samut lae susaan, 2015), Malaria and Mosquitos (2013), Mother (Mae, 2012), My Father (2010), Terribly Happy (Sudsanan, 2010), Black Air (2008), The Truth Be Told: The Cases Against Supinya Klangnarong (2007), Tune In (Sud thang rak, 2005), One Night Husband (2003), Mae nak (1997), Under Taboo (1992)

2013

14 mins

A man hides out in the mountains after accidentally killing a priest. But the area, a battlefield for soldiers and rebels, is far from safe. The fateful location is visualised with a mixture of oppressive, moving and still, black-and-white archival images.

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Jet Leyco (1987, Philippines) is an independent filmmaker, cameraman and editor, as well as teacher for the Asia Pacific Film Institute. He gained experience in filmmaking as an intern for the Filipino directors Lav Diaz and Khavn De La Cruz. In 2011 he made his debut feature Ex Press, which was also his graduation film at the Asia Pacific Film Institute in Manila. His second feature Leave It for Tomorrow, for Night Has Fallen (2013) was made with a Hubert Bals Fonds grant for script development. His most recent feature Town in a Lake (2016) had its international premiere at the Singapore IFF. Filmography: Town in a Lake (Matangtubig, 2016), Leave It for Tomorrow, for Night Has Fallen (Bukas na lang, sapagkat gabi na, 2014), Not a Soul (2013), The Universe (2012), Ex Press (2011), Blank (Patlang, 2011)

Super Taboo Su Hui-Yu Taiwan

2017

19 mins

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

Adapted from historical texts, the narrative in the two-channel video artwork Super Taboo came from a pornographic publication, which was previously known as xiaoben (‘a small book’), with the same title. In addition to illegal copies of pornographic photos from Japan and Western countries, the undisguised description of erotic scenes is now a mesmerizing vernacular Chinese literature. In this video, the renowned actor Chin Shih-Chieh guides the viewers into a surreal erotic scene by playing the role of an urban white-collar worker who mutters the plots of the ‘small book’ in his hands. Filmmaker Su Hui-Yu leads us back to the 1980s when he was an adolescent in Taiwan. Pornographic content was then edged to the periphery of the audio-visual system and merely tolerated by late night shows, secret rooms in video rental shops or inconspicuous corners in bookstores. However, banned pornographic content tended to put greater erogenous temptation in our way than that freely accessible to us did. Su’s fascination with this subject matter is reminiscent of Georges Bataille, who was interested not so much in the pleasures of the flesh but what is classified as ‘dirty’. Physically pleasant sensation seems to be perilous and ergo requires the endorsement by the transcendental love or a social context as the foundation. 68

Landscape Series #1 Nguyễn Trinh Thi UK Premiere

Vietnam

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

Su Hui-Yu (1976, Taiwan) studied Fine Art at the National Taiwan Normal University and the National Taiwan Univeristy of Arts, both in Taipei. Su is interested in the connections between media, images, history and daily life, and his videos explore both the mass media’s impact on viewers and the projection of viewers’ thoughts and desires onto these media. His work deal with violence, sleep, the female body and a general interplay between reality and fantasy. Su’s videoworks and installations have been shown internationally and both of his solo exhibitions—’The Fabled Shoots’ (2007) and ‘Stilnox Home Video’ (2010)—were nominated for the Taishin Arts Award. In addition, Su was awarded the Asian Cultural Council Fellowship Award and participated in artist in residence programmes in New York, Munich, Los Angeles and the Czech Republic. In 2017, International Film Festival Rotterdam held a retrospective of Su’s videoworks, while his film Super Taboo (2017) premiered in the Tiger Competition for Short Films. Filmography: Super Taboo (Chao Chi Jin Ji, 2017), L’être et le néant (1962, Chang Chao-Tang) (2016), A Man After Midnight (2015), Men Carrying Shame (2015), Nue Quan (2015), the Color, the Tele, the Vision (2015), Shameful Strangers (2015), Thou Shalt Not Self-pollute (2015), The Upcoming Show (2013), Happy Birthday (2011), Stilnox Strolling (2011), Stilnox Home Video: The Midnight Hours (2010), A Horror Day (2010), She Ate the Face (2010), Bloody Beauty (2009), The Fable Shoots (2008)

2013

5 mins

As the journey starts, the vast empty landscape makes one wonder what one is looking for. A mysterious object? A crime scene? Something terrifying? The scenes grow more and more specific, but they do not lead to any concrete solution—only an injury in place of a metaphor. I am interested in the idea of landscapes as quiet witnesses to history. During my online search for such photos, I came upon hundreds of images in which anonymous persons were portrayed in landscapes—and always in the same position, pointing to indicate a past event, the location of something gone, something lost or missing. We are left knowing nothing about the people, their specific thoughts or feelings, only with their repetitious sameness—always indicating, pointing to ‘evidence’ of something—never good. Together these anonymous witnesses, portrayed in compelling uniformity by innumerable Vietnamese press photographers, seem to be indicating a direction, a way forward out of the past, a fictional journey. —Nguyễn Trinh Thi

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Nguyễn Trinh Thi is a Hanoi-based independent filmmaker and video/media artist. Her diverse practice has consistently investigated the role of memory in the necessary unveiling of hidden, displaced or misinterpreted histories; and examined the position of artists in the Vietnamese society. Nguyễn studied journalism, photography, international relations and ethnographic film in the United States. Her films and video art works have been shown at festivals and art exhibitions including Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; the Lyon Biennale 2015; Asian Art Biennial 2015, Taiwan; Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial 2014; Singapore Biennale 2013; Jakarta Biennale 2013; Oberhausen International Film Festival; Bangkok Experimental Film Festival; Artist Films International; DEN FRIE Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; and Kuandu Biennale, Taipei. Nguyễn is founder and director of Hanoi DOCLAB, an independent center for documentary film and the moving image art in Hanoi since 2009. Filmography: Eleven Men (2016), Vietnam The Movie (2016), Letters from Panduranga (2015), Landscape Series #1 (2013), Solo for a Choir (2013), Que Faire (2012), Jo Ha Kyu (2012), I Died for Beauty (2012), Song to the Front (2011), Unsubtitled (2011), Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over (2011), Terminal (2009), Spring Comes Winter After (2009), 93 Years, 1383 Days (2008), Love Man Love Woman (2007), A Chungking Road Opening (2005) Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Eleven Men was screened in BFMAF 2016

The Legend in the Mist Tony Chun-Hui Wu

The Breath Minyong Jang

Taiwan

South Korea

2012

10 mins

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

A tribute to King Hu, the pioneer of Asian martial art cinema. Originally screened as a three-channel video installation at the King Hu retrospective exhibition in Taiwan, the work is a montage of sequences from Hu’s classics Raining in the Mountain (1979) and Legend of the Mountain (1979). Inspired by the transience of mist (used effectively by Hu) and its paradoxical existence as a physical void, the assemblage of various misty and forest scenes in Legend in the Mist highlights the enduring theme of the Eastern poetic landscape in life and art—from ink wash paintings to Hu’s cinematic language and the Zen philosophy of life.

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Tony Chun-Hui Wu (1966) is a filmmaker, teacher, and curator. He received his BFA in Filmmaking at San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA in Film/Video from Bard College. His films have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, San Francisco Cinematheque, and Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in New York. Sentimental Journey (2003) was named the Best Experimental Film at 2003 Taipei Film Festival, and Noah, Noah (2004) won the same award at 2004 Taipei Film Festival, as well as the 27th Golden Harvest Award. Incarnation (Boy) (2003) and Europe Resurrection (2006) were shown in the 2006 Taipei Biennial: ‘Dirty Yoga’, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. Wu is a co-founder and curator of Image–Movement Cinematheque, as well as Artistic Director of EX!T Experimental Media Art Festival, Taiwan. He was a curator for 2009 Guling Street Little Theatre Arts Festival—with (out) cinema, as well as a member of many juries and selection committees. Tony Chun-Hui Wu has published three books devoted to the Taiwanese experimental scene and is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Shih Hsin University. Filmography: The Legend in the Mist (2012), exTAIPEIit (2006), Europe Resurrection (2006), Noah Noah (2004), Sentimental Journey (2003), Incarnation (Boy) (2003)

2007

10 mins

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

A respiratory exchange between the viewer and a bamboo forest.

sound that lets our minds flow into their own silent and/or sonic realms.’ — Charles Boone, San Francisco Cinematheque

‘Through the acts of very close looking and capturing on film, Minyong Jang relishes the discovery of all manner of perhaps otherwise unnoticed visual poetry. His films are also significantly about the advantageous juxtaposition of one image with another, the resulting one-plus-one adding up to considerably more than two. Take, for example, the clear sense of closure at the conclusion of The Breath, his just-completed film. All of the shots until just before the end result from the camera having been hand-held and pretty much always in motion. Jang seems to be saying, “Let’s just explore this small bit of nature and see what we discover.” At the end of the film, however, all motion stops. The highly abstract images from the now tripod-mounted camera, along with Jang’s precise editing, tell us without fanfare that the end is at hand. He thus subtly creates what musicians call a perfect-authentic cadence, the ultimate sense of closure. All of his work is about the unique kind of silence that film viewing sometimes engenders. What we are offered in these works is not just silence in the usual sense, but rather, the opportunity to experience the kind of concentrated absence of

Minyong Jang (1968) is a filmmaker and Associate Professor in the Division of Theater and Film at Seokyeong University, Seoul. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. Filmography: The Breath (2007), The Moment (2002), The Dark Room (2001)

Kamjorn Sankwan Jakrawal Nilthamrong & Kamjorn Sankwan

Invalid Throne Jakrawal Nilthamrong & Kamjorn Sankwan

Thailand

European Premiere

Thailand

Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

2018

16 mins

Thursday 20 September, 11:30 Maltings Main House

A short film about the life and work of the Kamjorn Sankwan, the film explores his work as a gaffer in the production of a Thai folk soap opera, a genre based on traditional Thai literature with Hindu cultural influences and fictional dynasties. The second half delves into Kamjorn’s personal interests, centralized around the mercenary soldiers who fought in exchange for Thai nationality.

Jakrawal Nilthamrong (1977, Lopburi, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok. He received a BFA from Silpakorn University in Bangkok and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nilthamrong makes work spanning from short and documentary films to installations and feature films. Themes of his work often relate to Eastern philosophy in the contemporary context, and local history of specific environments to establish dialogue among multiple perspectives. His shorts, documentaries and installations have been shown in international film festivals including Rotterdam, Berlinale, Toronto and Yamagata, as well as exhibitions like the 2012 Taipei Biennial and 2014 SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul. His feature Vanshing Point (2015) won the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2015. Kamjorn Sankwan (1968, Chiang Rai, Thailand) works as a gaffer, a head electrician on a movie set, and is also a freelance electrician. His father is from Payao and his surname literally means “lake edge”—a reference to Payao Lake. He spent his childhood in the small town by the forest where his family has lived for generations, and his education came mainly from his time spent in monkhood. After noticing a gap between his own beliefs and religious doctrines, he moved to Bangkok. Sankwan also writes short stories.

2018

10 mins

European Premiere Screening the Forest: Forest Experimenta

Set in Mueang Phayao, Invalid Throne examines the land and people who used to own property in the province. The disputed areas were overtaken by new feudalism and turned into a gold mine and an exclusive monastery, allowing only a select, elite few to enter its landscape. Shot on location in northern Thailand and in a studio (using a miniature landscape), the film weaves historical narrative with the personal memories of Kamjorn Sankwan, the artist and protagonist who was raised in that area, thereby raising questions to what constitutes as a national, collective history.

Nilthamrong and Sankwan’s collaborative films Kamjorn Sankwan and Invalid Throne were shown in the solo exhibition ‘Side Reel’ at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in 2018. Filmography: Jakrawal Nilthamrong: Invalid Throne (with Kamjorn Sankwan, 2018), Kamjorn Sankwan (with Kamjorn Sankwan, 2018), Vanishing Point (Jud ruam sai ta, 2015), Stone Cloud (2014), Intransit (2013), Hangman (2012), Zero Gravity (2012), Immortal Woman (2010), Unreal Forest (2010), Man and Gravity: Plateau (2009), Black Air (2008), Man and Gravity (2008), Orchestra (2008), Parallel Journey (2007), A Voyage of Foreteller (2007), Man with a Video Camera (2007), Patterns of Transcendence (2006) Kamjorn Sankwan: Invalid Throne (with Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2018), Kamjorn Sankwan (with Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2018)

Jîn Reha Erdem

Blood Amber Lee Yong-Chao

Turkey

Myanmar, Taiwan

2013

122 mins

Friday 21 September, 19:15 Maltings Main House

An existential thriller with touches of magic realism, Jîn follows 17-year-old Jîn, a Red Riding Hood with a fierce survival instinct. She is a freedom fighter who flees her armed organisation for reasons unknown. Jîn finds herself battling bravely through dark forests, spending solitary days in the mountains, and ultimately heading towards a city where her future is still unclear. Symbolising the complex and heated conflict between military forces and Kurdish guerrillas, the film contemplates the effect this military conflict has on the forest and mountains, including their inhabitants: animals, trees and the ecosystem enfolding them all, which doesn’t have the ability to fight back.

Screening the Forest

Born in Istanbul, Reha Erdem has graduated from the Cinema Department of the Paris 8 University. He obtained his Masters in Plastic Arts at the same university. He shot his first feature-length film Oh Moon! in 1989 as a French-Turkish co-production. He has written or co-written all of his feature films, directed a number of shorts as well as a theatre play, The Maids (Les Bonnes) by Jean Genet. Filmography: Big Big World (2016), Singing Woman (2013), Jîn (2013), Kosmos (2009), My Only Sunshine (2008), Times and Winds (2006), Ekim’de Hiçbir Kere (2006), Mommy, I’m Scared (2004), What’s a Human Anyway? (2004), Deniz Türküsü (2001), A Run for Money (1999), Oh, Moon! (1988)

2017

95 mins

Saturday 22 September, 16:30 Maltings Henry Travers

Somewhere in Burma, a forest rich in amber is controlled by the Kachin Independence Army. For most of the inhabitants, amber mining is their only means of subsistence. Working in harsh conditions under constant threat from the government army, these forest villagers live in fear and despair, with a future as dark as the end of the mining tunnel. Blood Amber is a richly cinematic documentary experience.

UK Premiere Screening the Forest

Lee Yong-Chao was born in the rural countryside in northern Burma. In 2015, he was selected to participate in the 7th Golden Horse Film Academy, the mentorship and development program founded by Hou Hsiao-Hsien. Lee produces his films mainly in Taiwan and Burma. One of his short films was nominated for Busan International Film Festival competition, while another short film shot simply on a smartphone was nominated for Warsaw Film Festival competition. Blood Amber is his first feature documentary. Filmography: Gold (2018), Quan Ma He (2018), Blood Amber (2017), Jade Man (2014), Heaven Diary (2013), Husain Street (2010)

Introduced by Dr Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn This special screening of Jîn is kindly supported by Berwick Film Society

Genpin Naomi Kawase

Worldly Desires Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Japan

Thailand

2010

92 mins

Sunday 23 September, 15:45 Maltings Main House

Naomi Kawase is amongst the most renowned of contemporary Japanese filmmakers and Genpin is a sensually shot documentary revelation. In the heart of a dense Okazaki city forest, we follow Dr. Tadashi Yoshimura, midwives and expectant mothers during four seasons at a natural childbirth clinic. Employing centuries old practices that often run askew from contemporary medicine, Kawase’s tender film oscillates between the intimate moments of joy, pain and doubt in honouring this way of life. The title Genpin recalls the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: ‘The valley spirit never dies / It is named the mysterious woman (genpin).’ In the film, Yoshimura reflects on the relationship between childbirth and death, and observes— more as a human being than a doctor—that to deny death is to deny life. Life born into this world, life that ends at the moment of birth, life that ends before birth. Lives do not cease as a solitary life but are carried on by the species, and continue. Through the flux of the Japanese seasons, Naomi Kawase entered the circle of the women giving birth at the Yoshimura Clinic and the world of Dr. Yoshimura—who has spent 40 years on the path of natural childbirth—and wove the footage she shot with her own 16mm camera into this film. 76

Screening the Forest

Born and raised in Nara, Naomi Kawase graduated from Visual Arts Osaka in 1989. Her films Embracing and Katatsumori received international recognitions and awards at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 1995. With her first feature, Suzaku (1997), she became the youngest filmmaker to receive the Camera d’Or at the Festival de Cannes. She has also won the Cannes Grand Prix with The Mourning Forest (2007), the Carrosse d’Or in 2009, and also served as one of the jurors for the competition in 2013. In 2015, Kawase was bestowed with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Minister of Culture. In 2017, Radiance was selected as one of the competition films and given Ecumenical Jury awards. Aside from being a filmmaker, she is the founder and Executive Director for the Nara International Film Festival. Filmography: Vision (2018), Parallel World (2017), Radiance (2017), Seed (2016), Lies (2015), Sweet Bean (2015), Still the Water (2014), A Field of Wasabi (2012), Chiri (2012), 60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero (2011), 3.11 Sense of Home (with Victor Erice, So Yong Kim, Kazuhiro Sôda, Ye Zhao, 2011), Hanezu (2011), Genpin (2010), Visitors (with Lav Diaz and Hong Sang-soo, 2009), Sinergias: Diálogos entre Naomi Kawase y Isaki Lacuesta (2009), Nanayo (2008), The Mourning Forest (2007), Birth/Mother (2006), Shadow (2004), Shara (2003), Letter from a Yellow Cherry Blossom (2002), Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (2001), Firefly (2000), Mangekyô (1999), The Weald (1997), Suzaku (1997), This World (1996), Sun on the Horizon (1996), See Heaven (1995), Katatsumori (1994), Embracing (1992)

2005

43 mins

Sunday 23 September, 17:45 Maltings Main House

A couple escape from their families and flee deep into the jungle. At nightfall, a song illustrates the innocence of their love and their search for happiness. Palme d’Or winning filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul invited fellow Thai filmmaker Pimpaka Towira to shoot a 35mm film in the forest while he observed the production though his digital camera. While Worldly Desires is dedicated to Weerasethakul’s memories of filmmaking in the jungle from 2001–05, it is also a story of forbidden love and desire, loaded with poetry, metaphor and mystery.

Working in the space between cinema and contemporary art, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (1970, Bangkok) creates installations, videos, short and feature films that are often non-linear and transmit a strong sense of dislocation and otherworldliness. By using unconventional narrative structures, expanding and contracting the sensation of time, and playing with ideas of veracity and linearity: Weerasethakul’s work sits comfortably in a world of his own making. Weerasethakul earned his BA in architecture from Khon Kaen University in Thailand and his MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1999, he co-founded Kick the Machine Films, a company that has produced many of his own films as well as other experimental Thai films and videos that could not find support under the established Thai film industry. His art projects and feature films have won him widespread recognition and numerous festival prizes, including three from the Cannes Film Festival: A Certain Regard for Blissfully Yours in 2002, Prix du Jury for Tropical Malady in 2004, and Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in 2010.

Screening the Forest

Filmography: async–first light (2017), 2017 (2017), Ablaze (2016), Invisibility (2016), Fan Dog (2016), Fever Room (2015), Vapour (2015), Cemetery of Splendour (2015), Rolling (2015), Fireworks (Archives) (2014), Footprints (2014), La Punta (2013), Dilbar (2013), The Importance of Telepathy (2012), Cactus River (2012), Mekong Hotel (2012), Ashes (2012), Sakda (Rousseau) (2012), Trailer for CinDi (2011), M Hotel (2011), Monsoon (2011), Empire (2010), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (2009), Primitive (2009), Phantoms of Nabua (2009), Haiku (2009), An Evening Shoot (2009), Nabuda Song (2009), I’m Still Breathing (2009), A Dedicated Machine (2009), Making of the Spaceship (2009), Mobile Men (2008), Vampire (2008), Prosperity for 2008 (2008), Luminous People (2007), Meteorites (2007), Emerald (2007), My Mother’s Garden (2007), The Palace (2007), Unknown Forces (2007), Because (2007), Teem (2007), Syndromes and a Century (2006), The Anthem (2006), Faith (2006), Waterfall (2006), Ghost of Asia (2005), Worldly Desires (2005), Tropical Malady (2004), It Is Possible That Only Your Heart Is Not Enough to Find You a True Love: True Love in Green / True Love in White (2004), GRAF: Tong / Love Song / Tone (2004), This and Million More Lights (2003), Nokia Short (2003), The Adventures of Iron Pussy (with Michael Shaowanasai, 2003), Blissfully Yours (2002), Second Love in Hong Kong (2002), Golden Ship (2002), Haunted Houses (2001), Narratives: Masumi Is a PC Operator / Fumiyo Is a Designer / I Was Sketching / Swan’s Blood (2001), Secret Love Affair (for Tirana) (2001), Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Boys at Noon (2000), Boys at Noon / Girls at Night (2000), Malee and the Boy (1999), Windows (1999), The Lungara Eating Jell-O (1998), thirdworld (Goh Gayasit) (1997), 100 Years of Thai Cinema (1997), Rice Artist Michael Shaowanasai’s Performance (1997), Like the Relentless Fury of the Pounding Waves (1994), Kitchen and Bedroom (1994), 0116643225059 (1994), Bullet (1993)

Essential Cinema BFMAF’s retrospective series provides a fresh look at classic works of cinema or a first view of overlooked masterpieces. Each film is rarely-seen and most are shown in new restorations for the first time in the UK. Terror Nullius Friday 21 September, 17:30 (page 79)

TERROR NULLIUS Soda_Jerk Austrailia

2018

55 mins

UK Premiere

Friday 21 September, 17:15 Maltings Main House

Essential Cinema

Part political satire, eco-horror and road movie, TERROR NULLIUS is a counterculture film which offers an un-writing of Australian national mythology. Using existing film footage as raw material, the project works entirely within—and against—the official archive in order to achieve a queering and othering of Australian cinema. Envisaged as ‘A Political Revenge Fable In Three Acts’, TERROR NULLIUS is a world in which minorities and animals conspire, and not-sonice white guys finish last. Where misogynistic remarks are met with the sharp beak of a bird or the jaws of a crocodile, and girl gangs rule the highways. Within this fable, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo schools his young pal Sonny on intersectional feminism, a house is haunted by the spectre of queer Australia, the mystery of Hanging Rock is resolved and a bicentennial celebration is ravaged by flesh-eating sheep.

of connections that delivers an open invitation to a further cultural conversation.

Hyenas Friday 21 September, 19:30 (page 80) Tales of the Dumpster Kid Saturday 22 September, 18:30 (page 81) Lips of Blood Saturday 22 September, 21:15 (page 82) Some Interviews on Personal Matters Sunday 23 September, 13:45 (page 83)

Formed in Sydney in 2002, Soda_Jerk is a two-person art collective who work at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images: how they circulate, whom they benefit, and how they can be undone. Their sample-based practice takes the form of films, video installations, cutup texts and lecture performances. Based in New York since 2012, they have exhibited in museums, galleries, cinemas and torrent sites. Filmography: TERROR NULLIUS (2018), The Was (2016), Astro Black: Jungle Are Forever (2015), Undaddy Mainframe (2014), The Time That Remains (2012), Astro Black: Race for Space (2010), Astro Black: We Are the Robots (2010), After the Rainbow (2009), Tap Hop (2009), Astro Black: Armageddon in Effect (2008), Astro Black: Destination Planet Rock (2007), Hollywood Burn (2006), The Phoenix Portal (2005), Dawn of Remix (2002)

TERROR NULLIUS lays bare a paradoxical vision of Australia as a nation where idyllic beaches host race-riots, governments poll love-rights and the perils of the natural environment are overshadowed only by the enduring horror of Australia’s myth of ‘terra nullius’. It’s a beautiful, bloody mix of the historical and the speculative, the grindhouse and the art house. Not a definitive counter-narrative but a meticulous ramshackle 78

Hyenas Djibril Diop Mambéty

Tales of the Dumpster Kid Edgar Reitz & Ula Stöckl

Senegal, Switzerland, France

West Germany

1992

113 mins

1971

208 mins

Friday 21 September, 20:00 Maltings Henry Travers

Essential Cinema

Saturday 22 September, 18:30 Charlie’s Night Club

Essential Cinema

Linguère Ramatou returns to Colobane, a once charming village now devastated by poverty, with fabulous wealth and a promise to save her people. But tied to this promise is a deadly bargain: the lover who had betrayed a 16-yearold, pregnant Linguère, must be executed. The villagers—over time and through the hardship of daily survival—had long forgotten the incident, and they are at once confused, horrified and outraged. But soon cowardice sets in, shrouded in silence. While appearing to maintain a good moral conscience, the villagers are unable to resist the dazzling array of consumer goods that Linguère has now placed within their reach. On credit, they begin to purchase furniture and appliances—even those meant for houses without electricity!

and group solidarity, stressing the enduring, almost mythic status of the conflict between avarice and respectability. Hyenas is nothing short of poetry in motion.

BFMAF presents the first UK screening in 40 years of this innovative New German Cinema highlight. The Dumpster Kid (Kristine de Loup), born from a trash can, finds her way through the world, discovering hilarity, ecstasy, cruelty, capitalism and patriarchy along the way. Always wearing a red dress, red tights and Louise Brooks-style black bob, The Dumpster Kid steals, has sex, joins a sideshow and meets Al Capone and d’Artagnan. She is always in danger, yet immortal.

Ula Stöckl (1938, Ulm, Germany) studied at the Institut für Filmgestaltung in Ulm, graduating in 1968. She has since directed numerous theatre productions and films. She has also worked as an associate lecturer at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (dffb) and is an associate professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Stöckl has served on selection committees and juries for numerous festivals including Berlinale and Venice. Her film The Sleep of Reason received the Deutschen Filmpreis (Germany’s top film prize) in 1984. Her film The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968) is currently touring the UK as part of the ICO/ Club des Femmes season ‘Revolt, She Said’.

Completed just a few years before the filmmaker’s passing, Hyenas is a cautionary tale packed with humorous, compassionate yet explosive scenes. Mambéty forges his narrative with humour and paints characters, spaces, dialogues and gestures with breath-taking images in sumptuous colours. He skilfully and playfully sways us back and forth in time, with slots of 19th century pomp followed by 20th century appliances. Desire, materialism and various modern day artefacts come to test the old values of individual dignity 80

Introduced by artist and researcher Layla Gaye Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945–1998) was a Senegalese film director, actor, orator, composer and poet. Though he made only two feature films and five short films, they all received international acclaim for their original and experimental cinematic technique and non-linear, unconventional narrative styles. In 1973, Mambéty released his masterpiece Touki Bouki, a tour de force of narrative and aesthetic innovation. The film, which has been hailed as a classic of African cinema and restored by the World Cinema Project, received the International Critics Award at the Cannes Film Festival and Special Jury Award at the Moscow Film Festival. After an almost 20 year break in filmmaking, Mambéty returned to the limelight with Hyènes (1992), an adaptation of the Swiss-German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s satirical play ‘The Visit’ that transposed the story to Colobane, the town where Mambéty was born. Filmography: The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil, 1998), The Franc (Le Franc, 1995), Hyenas (Hyènes, 1992), Let’s Talk, Grandmother (Parlons Grand-mère, 1989), Touki Bouki (1973), Badou Boy (1970), City of Contrasts (Contras’ City, 1969)

This radical film was never meant to be shown in a cinema; instead, Reitz and Stöckl showed it in pubs. The audience members were encouraged to imbibe heartily and create their own sequence of the film’s 22 episodes. This special ‘pub cinema’ screening will be recreated for this event, an exceedingly rare cinematic treat that you won’t soon forget. Supported by Goethe-Institut, London Starting in 1957, Edgar Reitz (1932, Morbach, Germany) worked as a dramaturge, cinematographer and director of industrial and documentary films. He was one of the members of the Oberhausen Group and taught at the Institute for Film Design at Ulm College of Design. In 1966, he made his first feature film Mahlzeiten (Lust For Love) with his company Edgar Reitz Film Production, through which he’s produced numerous films. Since 1994, he has been professor for Film at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe. Reitz gained international renown with his Heimat trilogy, consisting of thirty-one individual feature-length films that build on each other.

Filmography: Edgar Reitz: Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision (2013), Ortswechsel (2007), Heimat Fragments: The Women (2006), Heimat 3: A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings (2004), Heimat 2: A Chronicle of a Generation (1992), Heimat: A Chronicle of Germany (1984), The Stories of the Hunsrück Villages (1982), Susanne tanzt (1979), The Tailor from Ulm (1979), Die Stunde Null (1977), Altstadt - Lebensstadt (1976), Bethanien (1975), Wir gehen wohnen (1975), Wir planen ein Picnic (1975), In Danger and Dire Distress the Middle of the Road Leads to Death (with Alexander Kluge, 1974), Die Reise nach Wien (1973), Kino zwei (1970), Uxmal (1969), Cardillac (1969), Filmstunde (1968) Fußnoten (1967), Mahlzeiten (1967), Schlagerfilme (1967), Die Kinder (1966), Karin Rohn. Gymnastik für alte Leute (1966), Binnenschifffahrt (1965), VariaVision. Unendliche Fahrt - aber begrenzt (1965), Speed (1963), Post und Technik, (1961), Kommunikation – Technik der Verständigung (1961), Einer wie du und ich aus Europa (1962), Yucatan (1961), Moltopren I–IV (1960), Cotton (1960), Ärztekongress (1960), Baumwolle (1960), Krebsforschung I und II (1959), Schicksal einer Oper (1958), Auf offener Bühne (1954), Gesicht einer Residenz (1954) Ula Stöckl: The Resistors “their spirit prevails...” (with Katrin Seybold, 2015), The Wild Stage (1993), Turn of the Heart (1993), The Old Song (1992), Don’t Talk About Fate (1991), Jakob’s Pigeons or Quarrel in Tomorrow Already (1984), The Sleep of Reason (1984), The Heiresses (1982), A Woman with Responsibility (1978), Erika’s Passions (1976), Popp and Mingel (1975), A Very Perfect Couple (1974), Rabbit and Porcupine (1974), The Little Lion and the Big Ones (1973), Brainworks (1972), Sunday Painting (1971), The Golden Thing (with Edgar Reitz, Alf Brustellin, Nicos Perakis, 1971), The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968), Saturday at 5PM (1966), Do You Have A Degree? (1965), Antigone (1964)

Lips of Blood Jean Rollin

Some Interviews on Personal Matters Lana Gogoberidze

France

Georgia

1975

88 mins

1978

95 mins

Saturday 22 September, 21:15 Maltings Main House

Essential Cinema

Sunday 23 September, 13:45 Maltings Henry Travers

Essential Cinema

Frederic is a maternally-dominated young man who by chance is awakened to a dormant childhood memory while attending the launch party of a new perfume. A chateau pictured in the perfume’s poster reminds him of a night, long ago, when he was lost and a beautiful young woman came out of nowhere to protect him through the night. Later, the woman—unaged—magically appears and beckons to him, and Frederic finds his way back to the chateau and to her, uncovering some dark secrets about his family’s past along the way.

Selected by Artist in Profile Sophia-Al Maria, who will introduce the film

Some Interviews on Personal Matters is one of the first feminist films of Soviet cinema and comes to Berwick freshly restored by Arsenal Berlin. Lana Gogoberidze’s narrative follows Sofiko, a journalist who interviews a wide range of women about their lives, desires and domestic labour. Laying bare the connections between the private and political in almost documentary style, the film focuses on the struggle between Sofiko’s independence and her obligations towards her own family. A powerful performance by Sofiko Chiaureli—who viewers will recognize from her iconic role in Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates—is at the center of what is a quite personal film for Lana Gogoberidze, one of three generations of Georgian women filmmakers from her mother Nutsa Gogoberidze (an associate of Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Mikhail Kalatozov in the 1930s) to her daughter Salome Alexi.

about their lives, hopes and dreams realises that her own happiness is mired by suffocating familial duties.’ —Tamar Koplatadze

Lips of Blood was French horror-erotica auteur Jean Rollin’s favorite of his own films and it contains many of his signature elements: crumbling seaside ruins, bloodthirsty vampires, poetically haunting cinematography and suspenseful intrigue. Of all his films, it perhaps best transcends his tendencies toward the poetical and arcane, while remaining at the same time true to his most personal, recurring obsessions: childhood, nostalgia, lost love, romantic quests, the cinema, obsolescence. Aided by a young Jean-François Robin, whose later talents as a cinematographer would spice up films in the 1980s by Jacques Demy and Andrzej Żuławski, as well as the Cinéma du look classic Betty Blue, Lips of Blood is one of Rollin’s most beautiful works. 82

Jean Rollin (1938–2010) was a French film director, actor, and novelist. His career, spanning over fifty years, is perhaps most associated with his first four vampire classics Le viol du vampire (1968), La vampire nue (1970), Le frisson des vampires (1970), and Requiem pour un vampire (1971). His films are noted for their exquisite, if mostly static, cinematography, off-kilter plot progression and poetic dialogue, their playful surrealism and recurrent use of well-constructed female lead characters. Outlandish denouments and abstruse visual symbols were trademarks throughout his ‘dark fantasy’ career. Remarkably, in spite of their seeming high production values and precise craftsmanship, his films were made with very little money, and often under crushing deadlines. In the mid-1970s, lack of regular work led the director to direct mostly pornographic films under various pseudonyms, a process he kept on going up until the 1980s. An utterly unique auteur fusing fantasy, horror and erotica, Rollin’s career has been in renaissance over the past decade, with a series blu-ray releases, multiple vinyl reissues by Finders Keepers/B-Music of soundtracks from his films, and books like Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin, an anthology comprised of writings by women critics, scholars and film historians. Filmography: The Mask of Medusa (Le masque de la Méduse, 2009), La nuit des horloges (2007), La fiancée de Dracula (2002), Two Orphan Vampires (Les deux orphelines vampires, 1997), Killing Car (La Femme Dangereuse, 1993), Lost in New York (Perdues dans New York, 1989), Sidewalks of Bangkok (Les trottoirs de Bangkok, 1984), The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante, 1982), Zombie Lake (Le lac des morts vivants, 1981), The Escapees (Les paumées du petit matin, 1981), The Night of the Hunted (La nuit des traquées, 1980), Fascination (1979), The Grapes of Death (Les Raisins de la mort, 1978), Phantasmes (1975), Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang, 1975), The Demoniacs (Les Démoniaques, 1974), A Virgin Among the Living Dead (with Jesús Franco & Pierre Quérut, 1973), The Iron Rose (La rose de fer, 1973), Requiem for a Vampire (Requiem pour un vampire, 1971), The Shiver of the Vampires (Le frisson des vampires, 1971), The Nude Vampire (La vampire nue, 1970), The Rape of the Vampire (Le viol du vampire, 1968), The Far Country (Les pays loin, 1965), The Yellow Loves (Les amours jaunes: Evocation de Tristan Corbiere, 1958)

‘Sofiko … seemingly epitomises the ideal of a Soviet superwoman who takes pride in working and running a household. However, behind the false veneer of a perfect family lie latent tensions which eventually tear it apart. Sofiko’s unaspiring husband is stuck in a bureaucratic job he dislikes, reprimands Sofiko for working too much and “digging in other people’s lives”, and finds comfort with another woman. Sofiko adores her job, however, and through interviewing other women

Lana Gogoberidze (1928, Tbilisi) graduated from Tbilisi State University (Department of the English Language and Literature) in 1955. She wrote her dissertation on Social Nature and Walt Whitman’s Poetry and had two collections of poetry translations of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore published. In 1958, she graduated from the Department of Filmmaking of the Moscow State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). Between 1958 and 1992, she enjoyed a rich filmmaking career, directing eight features and several shorts and documentaries. Her film A Day Longer Than Night was selected for the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Gogoberidze holds the State Award of the USSR (1979), State Award of Georgian SSR (1984), People’s Artist of Republic of Georgia and Order of Honour. In 1988, she was elected President of the International Association of Women Directors with headquarters in London. She has been a jury panel member and chair at many international film festivals. She was elected to the Parliament of Georgia in 1992-1995 and in 2004 served as Georgia’s Ambassador to France. In recognition of her efforts in filmmaking, poetry, translation and in promoting GeorgiaFrance friendship, Lana Gogoberidze received the French National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1997. Filmography: The Waltz on the Pechora (Valsi Pechoraze, 1992), Full Circle (Oromtriali, 1987), A Day Longer than Night (Dges game utenebia, 1984), Tserilebi shvilebtan (1981), Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Ramdenime interviu pirad sakitkhebze, 1978), The Little Incident (Aurzari salkhinetsi, 1975), When Almonds Blossomed (Rotsa akvavda nushi, 1972), Limits (Peristsvaleba, 1968), I See the Sun (Me vkhedav mzes, 1965), Under One Sky (Erti tsis kvesh, 1961), Tbilisi, 1500 Years (Tbilisi 1500 tslisaa, 1959), Gelati (1958)

Festival Club: Soul on the Tweed

Festival Club: Vital Idles & Yeah You!

Children & Young People Kaleidoscope

Friday 21 September, 22:00 Tweedmouth Bowling Club

Saturday 22 September, 22:00 Tweedmouth Bowling Club

Thursday 20 - Sunday 23 September, 11:00-17:00

Northern soul, R&B and club classics with DJs Carl Hudson and Michael Elliot. Free admission, all welcome.

The dirty beats and lo-fi stream of consciousness father and daughter duo Yeah You! (Elvin Brandhi & Mykl Jaxn) meet the left handed melodic messthetics of Glasgow’s finest: Vital Idles. Plus karaoke. All welcome!

Yeah You!

Kaleidoscope is a bean-bag cinema and family friendly art space. There is a rolling programme of animated films from Cinekid Festival Amsterdam. Hands-on making activities will be led by artists Katie Chappell and Chloë Smith. Song of the Sea Thursday 20 September, 15:30, (ages 5+) Song of the Sea is an enchanting Irish animation that tells the story of Ben and his little sister Saoirse. Hosted by artists Katie and Chloë, with popcorn.

Zoetrope-making workshop Friday 21 September, 15:30, (ages 7-13) Learn how to make an animation film with no film or gadgets!

School Screenings

Vital Idles

Secondary School Screening and Curator’s Talk Thursday 20 September 2018, 10:00, 15 Secondary Schools are invited to bring students to watch a dedicated screening of Jîn, introduced by Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn. An existential thriller with touches of magic realism, the film follows 17-year-old Jîn, a Red Riding Hood with a fierce survival instinct.

First Schools and Middle Schools Screening First schools: Tuesday 9 October, 10:00 (Years 3 and 4) Middle schools: Thursday 11 October, 10:00 (Years 7 and 8) BFMAF offers dedicated screenings for First and Middle Schools as well as a limited number of full day film-making workshops in schools. These can be used as part of an Arts Award Discover or Explore for the pupils involved.

BRIDGE STREE T

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GLASGOWFILM.ORG/GSFF Glasgow Short Film Festival is an operating name of Glasgow Film Theatre, a charity registered in Scotland No SC005932.

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Festival Diary

Festival Programmers & Contributors

Letitia Calin (Associate Programmer) is an artist, curator and researcher working at the intersection of artists moving image film programming, art curation, performance history and material culture studies. In her curatorial work she is predominantly preoccupied with manners of staging that enact a valorisation of feminist and collaborative methodologies, and the possibilities afforded by art to engender different kinds of social relations. Her most recent curatorial project is concerned with the sexual politics of female desire and patriarchal social and emotional reproduction. As part of the Research Department at the V&A Museum, she is researching the material conditions of museum exhibition displays in relation to choreographic and dramaturgical principles of object-relations in theatre and performance. In her spare time, she organises book clubs and free film screenings in community spaces across London as part of the curatorial and publishing platform Ingrid. Taylor Le Melle (Seminar Leader) is a curator and writer based in London. Taylor has programmed film, talks and performance series such as Serpentine Galleries’ ‘Park Nights 2017’ and several symposia. Other recent shows include McKenna Museum of Art (New Orleans), Chisenhale Dance Space, Arcadia Missa and Assembly Point (all London). Taylor’s writing has been featured in Art Monthly, Flash Art and Sophia Al-Maria’s upcoming Sad Sack (Bookworks, 2018). Taylor and artist Imran Perretta have initiated not/ nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative. With theorist Rowan Powell, Taylor runs PSS, a publisher of printed matter whose upcoming projects include a publication edited by Rehana Zaman. Taylor is currently Writer in Residence at Jerwood Visual Arts. Ben Pointeker (Associate Programmer) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Vienna and has been viewing festival submissions since 2015. Previously based in The Netherlands, he graduated from Piet Zwart Institute and won the Prix de Rome basic award. He is also a graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, chairman of the artist association Tiroler Künstler*schaft and has been artist in residence at Wiels in Brussels, in Shanghai, at the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo and at Bòlit in Girona. He received the Kunst-Stücke 92

award at Diagonale Graz and has exhibited at institutions such as Secession Vienna, Kunstpavillon Innsbruck, Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Filmmuseum Amsterdam and many film festivals. Herb Shellenberger (Associate Programmer) is a curator and writer from Philadelphia, based in London. He has curated screenings and lectured on film and contemporary art at museums, universities and film festivals internationally, and has written for Art-Agenda, The Brooklyn Rail, LUX and the Walker Art Center. He curated the series ‘Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s + 1980s’, which premiered at Tate Modern in 2017 and is touring internationally. In 2018, he curated the exhibition ‘Make, Believe: The Maslow Collection and the Moving Image’ (The Maslow Collection, Scranton, USA) and co-programmed the series ‘COMMON VISIONS’ with Almudena Escobar López, presented by the Flaherty Seminar at Anthology Film Archives. Becca Voelcker (Associate Programmer) is a PhD student at Harvard University. Her research looks at experimental cinema that engages in questions of place, land use and cultivation. Recently, she has been writing about walking as a political motif in film. Becca grew up bilingually in rural Wales. Before beginning at Harvard, she studied art at Goldsmiths, University of London, and film theory at The University of Cambridge. From 2013-15 she was based in Tokyo, Japan. Becca combines her research with curating and programming projects, and writes for Film Comment, Sight & Sound and Frieze. Before his role at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Hamish Young (Programme Assistant) worked at the 2017 Venice Biennale at both the German and British Pavilions. Previously he was an Information Assistant at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. He also works as an artist and has shown work at Collective (Edinburgh), Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, Royal Scottish Academy and DRAF Studio (London). This post is made possible by the Weston Jerwood Creative Bursaries programme

Thanks TN Allen Juliana Amaral Audela Artists Moving Image Northern Ireland: Jacqueline Holt, Michael Hanna Artists’ and Experimental Moving Image Ireland: Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick Arts Council England: Laura Cresser Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst: Angelica Ramlow Asda Tweedbank Barrels Ale House: Jaki Russel Berwick Academy: Pauline Plenderlieth Berwick Chamber of Trade: Dave Blackman, John Haswell, Stephen Scott Berwick Civic Society: Lady Zoreen Hill Berwick Film Society: Genni Poole, John Spiers and Maurice Ward Berwick Food & Beer Festival: Maurice and Ruth McNeely Berwick Literary Festival: Lindsay Dalgleish, Nolan Dalrymple, Colin Fleetwood, Trudy Gray, Ann Mawer, Christopher Smith, Michael Wright Berwick Preservation Trust: Jamie Anderson and Alison Douglas Berwick-upon-Tweed Record Office: Linda Bankier Berwick Museum and Art Gallery: Jane Miller Berwick Tourist Information Centre: Louise Dixon Berwick-upon-Tweed Community Development Trust: Julien Lake, Becci Murray Berwick Job Centre: Alan Skelly Berwick-upon-Tweed Freemen, Berwick Town Hall: Michael Herriott, Liam Henry Berwick-upon-Tweed Town Council: Gareth Davies and Julian Smith Berwick U3A Berwick Visual Arts: James Lowther Berwick Voluntary Centre: Fiona Calder Berwick Youth Project: Merrick Thompson Sebastian Buerkner BFI: Laura Glanville, Sarah Jane-Meredith, John McKnight Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image: Matthew Barrington, Michael Temple Gavin Black and Partners: Chris White Botany Studio: Bradlay Law, Duncan Russell Samantha Carey Cafe Crema Charlie’s Night Club: Matthew Robson Il Cinema Ritrovato: Karl Wratschko George Clarke Circa Projects: Dawn Bothwell, Adam Philips and Sam Watson Community Foundation: Jon Goodwin, Adam Lopardo, Mark Pierce CoffeeStop Cook Live Dream 94

CREAM, University of Westminster: May Adadol Ingawanij Cameron Crosby Red 61: Tony Davey Julia Davies James Dixon Doclisboa: Cíntia Gil EAI: Rebecca Cleman Eastern Borders Development Award: Edward Cawthorn and Peter Rutherford Kathryn Elkin English Heritage: Kathryn Pride, Sophie Howard Sergio Fant FICUNAM: Michel Lipkes Film Bee: Christo Wallers, Mat Fleming, Leah E. Miller Film Hub North: Anna Kime, Alison Kennedy, Sally Folkard Filmchief: Dennis Pasveer Firebreak Fire Securities Gasparros Poppy Frater Glasgow Short Film Festival: Matt Lloyd Goethe-Institut: Maren Hobein, Katrin Sohns Maaike Gouwenberg Greaves West and Ayre: Andrew Ayre, Vanda Martin Green Shop: Ross Boston Jane Hall and family Jim Herbert Guanajuato International Film Festival: Nina Rodríguez Lima Indie Lisboa: Miguel Valverde Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen: Hilke Doering International Film Festival Rotterdam: Inge de Leeuw Jerwood Charitable Foundation: Kate Danielson, Sarah Gibbon Hilary Lowe LNER: Lorna Stemp LUX: Ben Cook, Anthony Gartland, Alice Lea, Matt Carter LUX Scotland: Marcus Jack, Nicole Yip, Eve Smith Maltings Kitchen: David Foxton and all the staff Marks and Spencers Berwick Martins the Printers: Andrew Hardie, Chris Hardie Monica Menis & Cian McHugh Peter Merrington Elinor Morgan Morrisons Berwick Mule on Rouge: Sion Gates and Zoe Long Newcastle University: Vee Pollock, David Butler, Paul Becker Claire Newton Northumberland County Council: Wendy Scott, Nigel Walsh Northumberland Domestic Abuse Services: Karen Richardson Auguste Orts: Marie Logie

Outset Scotland: Kirstie Skinner, Amy Porteous Pavilion: Will Rose Martin Parker Laurence Pearson Projections New York Film Festival: Dennis Lim, Aily Nash Punto de Vista International Documentary Festival: Garbiñe Ortega Sanderson McCreath & Edney: Mark Pentecost Ben Rivers Helen Rutherford Catherine Seymour Louise Shelley Simpsons Malt: Richard Simpson, Shirley McCreath Slightly Foxed: Simon Heald Tessa Sowerby SQIFF: Marc David Jacobs Taste of Northumberland Taste of the Borders Tate Film: Carly Whitefield Matthew Walkerdine Harriet Warman Ed Webb-Ingall Talbot Rice Gallery: Tessa Giblin Tesco Berwick Tidekettle Paper The Needle Works The Little Vintage Shop The Lookout The Maltings: Ruth Bolam, Dan Cox, Neil Davidson, Ross Graham, Shona Hammon, Ros Lamont, Cloudy Manningham, Jimmy Manningham, Charlotte Payn, Wendy Payn, Steve Percy, David Purves, Matthew Rooke Tony Hacker Tweedmouth Middle School: Paula Beveridge Tweedmouth Bowling Club Tyneside Cinema: Ian Fenton, Monika Kasprzak, Rachel Pronger, Adam Pugh Union Brae Surgery: Helen Henderson Venice International Film Critics’ Week: Giona Nazzaro Visions du Réel: Emilie Bujès We Are Rushworth: Victoria Rushworth Wavelengths Toronto International Film Festival: Jesse Cumming, Andréa Picard YHA Berwick: Keith Webster, Harrison Aston-Monger and colleagues

2018 Volunteers Helen Ainsley Taryn Allan Tessa Archbold Adris Asghar Ian Bain Bill Bingham Valerie Bistram John Bonner Erica Boston Marie-Hélène Bourez Richard Bowden Janice Bowden Rona Bradley Coleen Brennan Amandine Butticaz Leanne Coulthard Cameron Crosby Walter Curtis Ben Driscoll Solomia Dzhu Dylan Edwards Bernard Eisenhauer Jean Eisenhauer Christine Elliott Leonie Findlay Chris Gibson Steve Holmgren Deborah Hudson Melinda Huttl Laura Jacobs Eve Johnstone Charlotte Keedy Martin Laidler Amy Lea Phil Lindsay Hilary Lowe Daniel Magill Julia Makojnik Alec Martin Laura McGinlay Joshua Megan Katie Melville Miranda Mungai Andrew Northrop Sasha Pollington Francesco Puppini Meg Scarborough Jayeon Song Tessa Sowerby Bill Steele Jeremy Sulpis Chloe Thorne Zuzka Ullmannova Susan Ward Elise Watson Peter Watts Gordon Williams Margaret Williams Tania Willis Amy Woodfine Moira Worboys Albert Wei Xiu Effrosyni Errika Zacharopoulou 95

We look forward to seeing you next year: 15th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival Thursday 19 - Sunday 22 September 2019