Part of the 2024 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival programme and early passes revealed

Early Bird festival passes are now on sale for this, the 19th edition that will run from March 7 to 10, at the reduced price of £45.

This year’s programme centres narratives of struggle and desire for personal, collective and political liberation.

The Filmmaker in Focus is Basma al-Sharif. Born stateless and of Palestinian heritage, the artist/filmmaker explores cyclical political histories and conflicts.

In films and installations that move backward and forward in history, between place and non-place, she confronts the legacy of colonialism through satirical, immersive, and lyrical works.

The Propositions strand is a discursive setting for 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 the filmmaking process.

This will include the UK premiere of barrunto (2024) by Emilia Beatriz. The 2020 Margaret Tait Commission is a feature length speculative fiction that takes place in a future of the past, in a present ruptured now.

The film is an intimate exploration of environmental grief and resistance in shifting landscapes of loss, from the streets of Puerto Rico to sites of nuclear contamination and military occupation in Scotland, from the bottom of the ocean to the planet Uranus.

Also included in the Propositions strand, artist Onyeka Igwe will present And Let History Begin – a discursive event rehearsing new futures through radical theatre. Igwe’s recent film A Radical Duet (2023) imagines the meeting, in 1940s London, of two anti-colonialist women who channel the revolutionary fervour and ideas of the time into writing a play.

Following the screening, Onyeka invites the audience to take part in a communal reading and discussion of Maskarade (1973), a play by the Caribbean theorist, playwright, novelist and intellectual Sylvia Wynter whose biography and theorisations were vital in the development of this film and the larger research project which proposes storytelling as essential to imagining the world otherwise.

BFMAF’s Essential Cinema programme is a pluralist retrospective series, proposing revisions and additions to what might be considered canonical cinema.

Selected for 2024, are four films which follow contemporary and restored stories delving into cross-generational relationships drawn between land and identity.

BFMAF will also present a new restoration of A Stolen Meeting (1989), the seventh and final feature of Leida Laius (1923-1996), one of Estonia’s most distinctive directors, whose films frequently depicted the fate of women and children in the late Soviet era.

Laius left behind a powerful body of work and A Stolen Meeting tackles many themes that still resonate today: home, migration, rootlessness and motherhood.

Meanwhile, in the The Hour of Liberation, director Heiny Srour and her team captured a now mostly-forgotten war in 1960s Dhofar.

Early Bird festival passes are available at https://bfmaf.org – this pass includes a tote bag and festival catalogue, and allows you to book tickets to all screenings, at no extra cost, when tickets go on sale on January 31.

A £30 for Under 30 festival pass is also available on the website, open to anyone 30 or under. Day passes will go on sale in early 2024.