At seven minutes’ walk from the main festival venue of The Maltings, the Gymnasium Gallery feels far away. This is one way to scale this year’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF). It comes from aggregating walking times with programme schedules, film running times and the need to eat – a miscalculation of which meant some friends and I ended up in a screening with wrapped cod and chips stuffed in our bags. In fact, the distances are small. In the same short time walking from the Gymnasium it is possible to circumnavigate the town’s river mouth peninsula via historic town walls (complete with canons), walk to the end of a pier, visit a beach or travel up the river path passing the three iconic bridges which straddle it.
At the opening screening of a restored version of ‘Phantom Beirut’ (1998), director Ghassan Salhab describes the festival as ‘human-scaled’, accurately summing up my own experience, which since arriving in Berwick and visiting the exhibition venues has included me being led to one screening personally by a Festival Volunteer, and enthusiastically introduced to the films on show by others.
This human approach runs right through the festival programme. Rather than having a singular prize category, since 2020 BFMAF has shared award status amongst all films selected for its New Cinema Awards strand. Essential Cinema showcases older films, challenging notions of the canon by including revisions and omissions. Discursive and performative events are showcased alongside screenings within Propositions, and at The Burr of Berwick, in a new strand launched this year, daily discussions, screenings and workshops are convened around different themes adding a different sense of time and space to the schedule. The project, led by Public Programmer Dawn Bothwell, operates at the festival from an empty shop on the high street Marygate, and will continue with community-engaged public programming throughout the year. Dropping into The Burr one day I joined an intimate conversation with filmmaker Razan AlSalah. On another occasion, Bothwell introduced a screening of a 1970s cine film presented by the King’s Own Scottish Borderers Regiment Association as being ‘without dialogue’, and I instead experienced live commentary from the regiment veterans who made up the audience.
Palestinian filmmaker Basma al-Sharif and Argentinian filmmaker Eduardo Williams are the two Filmmakers in Focus. Williams’ two docufictional features ‘The Human Surge’ and ‘The Human Surge 3’ are presented alongside Q&As, the latter premiering at the festival. Al-Sharif’s practice, which spans installation and cinematic screenings, is represented across multiple screenings, discussion events and an exhibition of ‘Deep Sleep’ (2014) at Berwick Town Hall. Of the two, it is al-Sharif’s practice that I get to know better, given the partial routes one must take through festival schedules.
On day one, at Berwick Town Hall, the pulsating visual and sonic rhythms of ‘Deep Sleep’ hold me mesmerised in my plush council chamber seat. A God-like finger points out destinations in the film’s Mediterranean landscapes that we jump to by movie magic. The ruins depicted are filmed in Malta, Athens and Gaza, and act as proxies gesturing to al-Sharif’s partial access to Palestine. I catch the film halfway through, and when it loops around, the strobe-like lights of the opening illuminate the chamber’s large plaster crest bearing Lady Justice. The lens flare image which I had seen as a still in social media promo and had dismissed as a quick shorthand for ‘film’ now affects me viscerally along with the itchy-making soundtrack. Seeing the blue sea, familiar from representations of Mediterranean holidays, repeated and played forwards and backwards makes me think of what we have too many images of, and how we might be able to see these anew.
This thought makes me track back to two other exhibition films I have just seen – ‘Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image’ (2023) by Adam Piron and ‘Hexham Heads’ (2024) by Chloe Delanghe and Mattijs Driesen. ‘Hexham Heads’ centres on the folktale of strange happenings in a Hexham home after stones bearing face-like markings were brought in by the children who live there. With an unnerving string instrumental soundtrack, it tells of ‘stone tape theory’, a hypothesis (derived from a 1970s horror play) about ghosts being residual hauntings captured in natural material such as stone, burned in like cassette tape recordings. ‘Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image’ is told through social-media-sampled imagery and a voiceover conversation between the filmmaker and his cousin, who met a Ukrainian soldier training at Fort Sill military base bearing a tattoo of their Native American grandfather. Scrolling online imagery (#military #miltok) expedites their peeling back of layers of colonial history. A memorable section animates thousands of Google images of unnamed Native American elders rendered in ink on skin. A very different archive to the haunted stone faces but no less disturbing to consider these likenesses seared into skin without permission.
Questions prompted by contemporary image surplus (and its hauntings) run through my experience of the festival. In the days following, an image of white phosphorus plays starkly in my mind. It’s one I am familiar with from those circulated on social media during the current war on Gaza, often overlaid with facts detailing the weapon’s war crime status and the inhumane devastation it causes. I saw the phosphorus in al-Sharif’s ‘We Began by Measuring Distance’ (2009), screened on the final day, an ‘auteur’-style narrated film with bold yellow overtitles, reminiscent of noughties Adam Curtis films, in which unnamed cartographers attempt to map their surroundings with insufficient metrics, dates and distances of exile that can never fully capture its violence.
The phosphorus explosion comes after shots of a purple jellyfish pulsating on a black background and red-hued smoke released like a magician’s misdirection. The assembled footage is accompanied by end-of-the-pier organ music with soaring strings that come in just as the white phosphorus explodes and its deadly fog fades out. The film cuts back and forth between luminous oceanic spectacle and that created by images of war. In this case, the 2009 war on Gaza after Israel dismantled settlements. Phosphorus’ only legitimate use is to illuminate battlefields and provide cover, literal smoke-and-mirrors theatricality which is darkly underlined by the film’s weary entertainer’s soundtrack. In the discussion following the film with poet Sarona Abuaker, al-Sharif describes making the film while working at a news gathering agency in Cairo, her family still in Gaza, as a response to the accumulation of images of violence and the ‘failure of storytelling’. Abuaker’s ‘Poem as Photon Returning to Audience (After Basma al-Sharif, Fady Joudeh, George Abraham and Bhanu Kapil)’, published in the festival’s programme, includes the lines ‘There is not much sky left / that isn’t covered by the white jellyfish’.
Razan AlSalah, speaking after the screening of her film ‘A Stone’s Throw’ (2024) on the Saturday, addresses the failure of storytelling about Palestine directly with the advice ‘don’t watch the news’. ‘A Stone’s Throw’ assembles a story of Zirku Island, an offshore oil platform and work camp, and the experiences of those working there, including Amine, a Palestinian elder who is also AlSalah’s father. The film combines 16mm seaweed prints, an image of people around an oil pipe zoomed in and navigated to the point of abstraction, satellite images of the island and tracking Bolex shots of Beirut’s division walls, described by AlSalah as ‘a way to trespass’ since photography is prohibited here. These approaches, she tells us, collectively resist the promise of the hyperreal offered by digital images. The hyperreal comes in only by way of juxtaposition, through two films incorporated as overlays. One is a nature conservation promotional film, the other a bizarre cartoony-CGI safety training video made by the oil company, which places the blame for employee deaths on the victims’ own lack of care. They are sampled ‘because you can’t make this shit up.’
Like AlSalah, other directors at the festival employ analogue processes to resist, skew or provide an alternative to dominant image cultures. Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon shot their experimental film ‘History of the Present’ (2023) on 35mm. It was developed from an opera of the same name, the choice of medium continuing their imperative to centre working-class women’s voices, which have traditionally been marginalised or excluded from grand narratives including opera and the operatic scale of 35mm. ‘History of the Present’ opens with Héloïse Werner, earpiece in, making vocal utterances. At times these are on the edge of speech, or song. Picture how young children play with speech as they learn to use it but add the delivery of an opera singer. Werner improvises sounds, translating them from audio recorded at the time of The Troubles, including helicopters and gunfire. We are presented with long shots of contemporary Belfast suburbia and denied media clichés, including images of balaclava clad paramilitary. Fusco tells us in the Q&A that these were fiction (press photographers apparently handed out balaclavas). Corrugated iron ‘peace walls’ between the backs of red brick houses emerge gradually in the film to my unfamiliar eye. They mute the view but once apprehended their presence is loud. They act as amplifiers.
There are allied aims in Tana Gilbert’s poetic feature ‘Malqueridas’ (2023). In this case, Gilbert gives collective voice to Chilean women serving long prison sentences. Where Fusco and Salmon created new images in the face of an insufficient archive, Gilbert has developed a process to dignify the low-res photos and videos taken by incarcerated women on contraband mobile phones. The footage captures spans of life which include romantic, platonic and parental relationships. Chilean prisoners who become mothers are only allowed to have their babies with them for their first two years.
In the film’s opening we are told there was a risk that this camera phone footage could be lost. What is the appropriate action to prevent three megapixel videos and photos from disappearing? They could be backed up on servers, tagged and archived. The filmmakers’ solution is to print each frame on paper and animate, creating a painterly fuzziness from the jagged edged lines of motion shots. Towards the end of the film, we hear the sound of a printer whirring reminding us of the labour involved, one of many acts of care in the film. Another is enacted by the fuzzy edges of the composite characters who narrate the film, and the fact those identifiable in the footage are no longer serving sentences. A line in the closing credits asks for ongoing consent, inviting anyone not happy with their inclusion to contact the filmmakers.
The care shown here contrasts comically with Cecile B Evans’ ‘producer’ character, who they play in their film ‘Reality or Not’ (2023) exhibited at the Gymnasium Gallery. ‘Reality or Not’ embraces the hyperreal. The producer attempts to corral a group of Parisian high school girls into making watchable reality TV content. They and we encounter a bewildering range of characters including a cast from the Real Housewives universe, the voice of Ulrike Meinhopf, a blue butterfly and a Greek statue furious about the fact their image is repeatedly reproduced. I think it is the producer who says the line in the film: ‘just because it’s a coherent narrative doesn’t mean it’s right.’ The students ultimately reject the producer’s storyline. I watch the film through a few times to try to catch its densely layered references and to hear the hip-hop version of Enya’s ‘Only Time’ again.
Depending on your route, other traces could be drawn through the festival; these could emerge through discussions at The Burr, in The Maltings’ bar, on walks between venues, talking to volunteers at the exhibitions and at the parties. I am surprised by a thread about the parts of war to be celebrated. Salhab’s ‘Phantom Beirut’ tells the story of a brother and friend returning, under a new identity, to a group of friends in Beirut in the late 1980s. The director breaks the film’s narrative at several points as we cut to one-to-one interviews with the lead actors. One says she preferred her life in the war, when she thought and acted in the moment. People were kinder, she says. In Heiny Srour’s ‘The Hour of Liberation has Arrived’ (1974), the feminist, secular, horizontal society of Dhofar created by The Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf feels so utopian it’s easy to forget that the children demonstrating admirable agency and responsibility for their learning in the Front’s schools are also holding guns.
This year the festival has coincided with International Women’s Day, a Palestinian Solidarity action in the town centre and Mother’s Day. These events amplify the way this year’s programme encompasses vast scales, including inhumane histories and presents. Through thoughtful programming, including commissioned essays, discussions and events, it maintains personal connection within a dense schedule, and spotlights ways humans can find solidarity and joy and invent new languages where existing ones fail.
Kate Liston is an artist and writer based in Gateshead.
The 19th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival ran from 7-10 March, 2024.
This review is supported by Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival.
Published 20.05.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
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