At the end of March, Misha Zakharov— film scholar and curator at Screening Rights, the West Midlands Film Festival of socially engaged and formally innovative cinema, and guest curator at this year’s Flatpack Film Festival—visited the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF).
In a new blog post, Misha reflects on their experience of the festival, exploring how it amplifies marginalised voices and engages thoughtfully with Berwick’s historically significant architecture.
"The festival was a profoundly moving and intellectually stimulating experience, and I look forward to attending it again, as well as screening some socially engaged and formally innovative titles in a similar vein in the Midlands."
Blog written by Misha Zakharov
In the last week of March, thanks to a bursary from Film Hub Midlands, I was able to travel to the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival — a dream I’ve had for many years. The festival, a major showcase of experimental cinema now in its 20th year, takes place in Berwick-upon-Tweed, a small town historically contested between Scotland and England. As a border town, it was fortified, and the remnants of the fortifications are still present, with some being used as screening venues. This liminal space, where militarism is quite palpable, fittingly serves as a place to reflect on and critique British and other colonialisms.
This year, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival also highlighted various marginalised perspectives, including those of women’s and AIDS cinema, with multiple titles being screened for the first time in forty years. I’m really grateful to Film Hub Midlands for the opportunity to attend Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and to learn with and from other film specialists, researchers, and artists.
Here are some of the highlights from the four intense days of events and screenings:
- The UK premiere of the restoration of Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981), a film considered to be lost for forty years, was recently rediscovered at the BFI archive and restored by Lightbox Film Center in Philadelphia in collaboration with Cinenova and the BFI. This hypnotic work follows one night of a somnambulist receptionist at the West London Portobello Hotel, portrayed by punk icon Jordan (of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee fame), and the hotel’s eccentric guests. Rose (who sadly didn’t live to see the restoration’s premiere) was singled out by Jarman as one of the major avant-garde voices in contemporary British cinema, the screening was attended by Jarman’s frequent collaborator, Tilda Swinton. A truly special film that deserves to be seen and will likely rewrite not just British women’s film history, but film history in general.
- An incredible programme of films by Marion Scemama, a French filmmaker who socialised with European leftists such as Félix Guattari and Sylvère Lotringer (the founder of the Semiotext(e) publishing house) and was a close friend of queer artist David Wojnarowicz, a subject of many of her films, including three devastating AIDS shorts screened in Berwick (When I Put My Hands on Your Body, If I Had a Dollar to Spend, and Summer 89). The highlight of the programme, though, was Relax Be Cruel (1983), a film Scemama made before she met Wojnarowicz, which documents the Pier 34 warehouse project in New York — a popular cruising spot that also acted as an ephemeral museum for uncredited artworks displayed or painted on the walls, and which was demolished soon after the film’s completion. Initially a 90-minute feature, the film survives as a 40-minute short, as unfortunately, the rest of the materials were destroyed in a fire that broke out in Scemama’s apartment.
- Another programme focused on AIDS was dedicated to the pioneering British and Canadian AIDS activist Stuart Marshall, who left behind multiple artists’ tapes and videos, including Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and Its Symptoms) from 1983, likely the first AIDS activist video in the global archive. It was considered lost for many years and was recently rediscovered by researcher Conal McStravick, who presented Marshall’s legacy in Berwick in conversation with AIDS historian Theo Gordon.
- Fellow film curator Abiba Coulibaly’s live video essay Black & Arab Encounters on Screen explored the complicated relations between Black and Arab communities in the Maghreb cinema through the lens of landmark films such as Mostafa Derkaoui’s About Some Meaningless Events (1974) and Ahmed El-Maanouni’s Trances (1981).
- Filmmaker Philip Rizk’s programme Ways of Seeing Fanon revolved around the ideas of Martinican psychiatrist and decolonial thinker Frantz Fanon and included works by Algerian filmmaker Assia Djebar, Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, and the Guyanese Victor Jara Collective.
It’s also worth noting the dedication that the team at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival put into working with the local context, with some films screened inside temporarily repurposed historical buildings: Town Hall, the soldiers’ barracks, and St. Aiden’s Peach Church, where a 5-hour-long anthology Some Strings, inspired by the poet Refaat Alareer, was shown to honour the thousands of Palestinians martyred in Gaza. The festival was a profoundly moving and intellectually stimulating experience, and I look forward to attending it again, as well as screening some socially engaged and formally innovative titles in a similar vein in the Midlands.
Launched in March 2024, Some Strings has united over 100 artists to create nearly six hours of short films, with ongoing international screenings across cinemas, festivals, community spaces, protest camps, and arts centres. For more information on the curation of this screening, please refer to their Programmers Notes at Some Strings – BFMAF
Inspired to attend a film festival? You can find all you need to know about applying for a bursary to attend vital events for industry progression here.