Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

#BFMAF #BerwickFilmFest

In September, I came across a tweet by the White Pube (<3) recommending to people who write about art that they try and get press accreditation for the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. As someone who (albeit infrequently ops) writes about art and who thinks getting ‘press accreditation’ sounds very validating, I was tempted.

Couple googles later, I find out that BFMAF is one of the UK’s leading festivals for new cinema and artists’ moving image, based in England’s most northerly (and adorably quaint) town. After spotting Ayo Akingbade’s name on the program, I was sold.

They were kind enough to grant me the press accreditation and even send me a catalogue on the mail, which starts with the following words:

“A very warm welcome to the 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. I’ll spare you all any hot take on 2020 but myself and my colleagues have had to reimagine what the Festival might be.”

Such a nice concise intro. I too will spare you of my ~hot takes~, but will say that, to me as a viewer, there was no reimagining: I have never imagined what a film festival might be. I have never been to one. So these takes might not be hot but they sure will be fresh lol.

I’ll warn anyone reading this my relationship to film is very much of the ‘childhood classics and guilty pleasures’ nature, but anytime I make time to sit down and watch a movie properly I remember what my grandpa once told me when I shared feelings of anxiety. He said he was very stressed at some point in his life and that the doctor recommended that when he started to get upset like that, he should stop everything and go watch a movie. As much as at the time I had all kinds of comebacks like ’oh it’s not that simple’, ‘that’s not realistic’, I gave it a shot. And every time I allowed myself to be immersed in a movie it helped, even if just a little. This allowed me to channel the same strategy into other forms of narratives I could escape to, to rediscover novels, to work on focusing all my senses on one thing at the time.

This was my experience with BFMAF.

Going to the movies can be like a small ritual and so I turned my own domestic watch parties into ritualised moments as well. Granted my fried little brain with a millenial-during-quarantine attention span struggled sometimes, which is why most movies commented here are of the shorter nature. But every movie was a small moment to catch my breath and to be surprised by the ways in which creativity can unfold in film form - that’s the perk of being a novice into any field, it’s all new and fascinating.

Note: the podcasts / conversations with filmmakers are still available on their website, no login needed - highly recommend!

Alright, now on to the films…

Payal Kapadia

I was particularly touched by Payal Kapadia’s work and its beautiful ethereal visuals, which are so powerful in the way they bring to mind and body the memory of sensory experiences. It’s as if the smell of cooking coming from the kitchen in Afternoon Clouds floods into the room, as if you too are tasting the flavour of The Last Mango Before Monsoon and feeling that texture between your teeth, as if that feeling of humidity in the air is just as present as it is in the dense forests of And What is Summer Saying.

Stills from Afternoon Clouds

How this is achieved technically I have absolutely no idea, but I’m very happy to just experience it unknowingly. Across her films, there also seem to be a continuous exploration of the dynamic relation between human and nature, especially in films that seem more observational, almost ethnographic (perhaps?) in their method. In The Last Mango Before Monsoon this is most evident, since the movie is based on footage from camera traps that map the movement of elephants to avoid conflict between animals and humans. The duality of the human x nature relationship was very present in the contrast between the scene of a woman enjoying a mango, and the underlying theme of a somewhat threatening natural presence of the elephants – here, there is delight and there is impasse. In ‘And What is Summer Saying’, an anecdote about a father and son who are followed home by a tiger, as well as the voiceover that compares human affection and the life of “bees who must die because they are in love”, alludes to similar themes. Watching this “informal trilogy”, as the commentary titles it, was like navigating through memories, with a consistent lens and similar stylistic expression throughout, but with the versatility and variety of unexpected human experience. Really sublime.

Izza Génini

Described as a pioneering woman in Moroccan cinema who grapples with themes such as diasporic identity, Izza Génini documents her ‘return’ to Morocco and rediscovery of its culture and music, as well as ideas around her Jewish heritage in that setting. In Aïta and Rhythms of Marrakech, she focuses on Moroccan culture as it expresses itself in different musical ‘genres’ (Dekka, Houara, Mwazniya & Aïta) and how they animate the landscape of the city, specifically of Marrakesh. This theme continues onto her Vibrations in Upper Atlas, where she explores how in the Atlas Mountains, the closeness of men and women to nature has led them to “reintroduce nature into their music” – a phrase included in the movie, and beautifully illustrated by the image of women chanting as they harvest.

Her ‘Return to Oulad Moumen’ was very personally relevant to me, as I too come from a Jewish family with a long history of migration across Europe and Africa and have tried to piece together a narrative of family history from memories of relatives. Perhaps because of this, I had a sense of nostalgia experiencing the filmmaker’s rediscovery of her family history, heritage and culture. The beginning and ending scenes stuck with me the most. The opening scene shows the celebration of the Passover Feast, which welcomes the “eternal return of spring”.

A table is set with symbols and delicious food, as the voice over reveals “generally, on this occasion, the Jews and the Muslims give each other the proofs of their strong friendship”. This introduces a strong running theme throughout the documentary, as in most instances where the persecution of Jewish people drives Izza’s family to move, there is some mention of Arab allyship, cooperation, offer of refuge – something I was unaware of and delighted to learn. The closing scene depicts Izza and all of her family celebrating her birthday in Oulad Moumen together. Maybe because I’m used to a very Hollywood-like narrative in which things come full-circle, this moment stayed with me as a very positive, heart-warming feeling – how wholesome is that, tho?

Rhea Dillon

It’s hard to find words to describe the next work, especially since the artist does such an amazing job of translating her work into conversation – a great feature of this online festival. The Name I Call Myself is originally a dual screen installation, which uses a signature scent to engage the public with more than just vision, based on Dillon’s interest in olfaction as a means of accessing memories and installing new ones. Although I didn’t experience the film with the scent, it did install memories into my mind by the sheer power of the imagery and words spoken in the voiceover.

Hopefully the screenshots below can help convey this, but still they are but a couple facets of the many ones explored by the filmmaker in her homage to the multiplicities of Black and LGBTQIA+ identities. I felt like this work honoured every person involved in it as an individual while at the same time suggesting the importance of community and union.

Tiffany Sia

I also really enjoyed Never Rest/Unrest, shot on her phone (!). She documents mainly the wave of protests which began in Hong Kong in 2019 and began to fizzle out due to the pandemic. Scenes with a more journalistic feel, generally depicting the protests themselves, are interspersed with scenes from daily life, with political turmoil featuring in the background, as a news broadcast on a TV or laptop – if I was being pretentious I could say this is ‘meta’ in the way it documents the documentation of protests. This really shows the contrast between the media imagery, with its particular brand and aesthetics of narrative building, and the situation on the ground. Sia’s depiction of both scenes of frantic action and those of travelling to protests like to any other occasion, for instance, offer insight not only into different visuals of protests, but also their pace and process. This made me think a lot about the rhythms of any initiative that aims at being revolutionary, a reflection that was also inspired by Ayo Akingbade’s films.

Ayo Akingbade

The range of expression she master’s is just incredible. Some of the films shown at BFMAF were part of No News Today, a trilogy of films focused on social housing, “tied together through an interweaving of archive, fiction, 16mm film, digital, activism and dreams” as the catalogue so beautifully puts it.

Its constituent parts are Tower XYZ, which feels like a 3 minute visual poem set in London’s social housing blocks, Street 66, which is documentary-like in its focus on the life of Dr. Theodora Boatemah and her impact on the housing in the Angell Town estate and Dear Babylon (my personal favourite), which is a brilliant work of fiction. It tells the story of a fictional Housing Bill proposing changes with severe consequences for tenants, causing a group of young people to feel a call to action and produce a film on the situation. Here, “Akingbade narrativized her own project”. For someone who has just begun to think about filmmaking, this was simultaneous insight into story telling in practice and its inner-workings as a creative process.

Zinzi Minott

A definitive highlight was 'Fi Dem III, Ancestral Interference', a work that stands out with it particular stylistic approach to interweaving stories, using layers of digitally edited images and remixed sounds to create a sensation of 'glitch'. The text which accompanies the film reads: "There are people fighting for and with us on many planes—Ancestral interference. Read between the glitch. Ancestral interference."

Breaking waves, both digitally created and natural, begin to reveal images of immigration, of the Windrush ship, of the COVID death-toll printed on illustrations of slave ships, of the London riots and BLM protest signs that remind us that 'the UK is not innocent' - past and present. I really admired how the film was both poetically nuanced and so poignantly clear: "My ancestors meddle, they interfere, they see cracks and break through and they scream with us, they rage with us, they remind us" - let that sink in, the film sure did demand that.

Yu Araki

A final mention goes to Fuel, a short gem of a film, which shows an expert griller in the Japanese restaurant Kushiro Robata-yaki, preparing food and tending to the fire. The movie begins with focused silence, and sound begins to flicker in as sparks come up from the fire, drawing attention to the interaction between person, element and food. Initially, as the scenes are focused on the griller and the food, it made me think of how ancient this practice of putting food over a fire is. As the movie progresses and we see more of the restaurant environment, the movie also illustrates how this interaction with a natural element, once perhaps more ritualised, has mutated into the practice of feeding others and into restaurants as businesses – but which nonetheless still has much ritual in its practices.

I write this as a brief overview of the movies I watched because I’m curious as to how my perception of them now might shift as in the future as I forget particular details, or as I learn more about film and stray away from my first impressions and more personal, sensory concerns into a more technical approach. Hopefully, I will still maintain that novice excitement. Either way, this was a really interesting exercise and I’m inspired to learn more about a new mode of creativity – and if you read this far, I highly recommend giving a film festival a little look…