Thought-provoking line-up at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival enjoyed by attendees

The festival attracts an abundance of curious visitors from afar, but it is the moving image exhibitions that are crucial in keeping local residents engaged as they enable them to experience and explore typically closed-off areas of Berwick.

My favourite exhibition was the Japanese film ‘tempo’, directed by Yu Araki and released last year, located in a now-abandoned shop on the high street.

It was an incredibly still, bleak film about an old man struggling to run his grocery store and keep it afloat.

Leaving the building, and observing the similarly derelict store to its left, I could appreciate the daunting themes that were able to transcend the film into the very venue in which we were viewing it.

These filmic parallels continued across the exhibitions, such as in the famous Gunpowder Magazine where we viewed Paradiso XXXI, 108, dir: Kamal Aljafari, 2022 – a chilling, Palestinian film using Israeli military found footage, whilst surrounded by old barrels, once full of gunpowder.

The Maltings was screening feature films throughout the festival weekend. A fascinating documentary ‘Nedarma’ is about a normadic tribe, called the Nenets, in Northern Siberia, which explored daily life and beliefs. The director, Anastasia Lupui, is also a Nenet.

Neamh McEnaney, 17, one of the Berwick Academy students visiting the festival, said her favourite film was ‘Life on the CAPS’, directed by Bennani, which shows the political allegory of immigration entangled beneath the film’s sci-fi absurdity.

She said it was “totally bizarre, but I loved it”, praising the film’s success in tackling the “mistreatment of people trying to cross borders” and “how police are brutalising immigrants”.

Overall, the BFMAF was a sizzling success – it creates a real excitement in the town and shows different films which we don’t normally get a chance to see.