Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

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A series of conversations with artists & filmmakers participating in the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF), from the 16th edition of the festival in 2020 to the most recent, 20th, edition in 2025. BFMAF is an organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image based in Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the border of England and Scotland. The Festival leads through collaboration and research, with a resolute commitment to peer support, artistic production and community development. The Festival is recognised for its innovative programming and critical engagement.

  1. 09/10/2025

    Q&A with Kim Coleman – BFMAF 2025

    BFMAF public programmer Dawn Bothwell talks to artist Kim Coleman about her work with Wendy Clarke and their Endless Love Tapes exhibition at BFMAF 2025. Endless Love Tapes Director: Wendy ClarkeYear: 1977 – present‘If every person on the planet could make a love tape, then you’d really know what it’s like to be human’ ~Wendy Clarke Endless Love Tapes (United Kingdom, 2025) is a pilot project by Wendy Clarke (US) and Kim Coleman (UK). Artist Wendy Clarke’s participatory video project, Love Tapes – which she began in 1977 – is an incredible collection of over 2,500 three-minute videos where people discuss what love means to them. But how can a participatory art project started by an individual artist continue indefinitely? And how can everyone really participate in it? Clarke and Coleman aim to answer this question and to achieve what Clarke has always wanted – for everyone in the world to be able to make a Love Tape. The pair have crafted a manual to share and continue Clarke’s process, enabling people to add Loves Tapes from their own communities to the growing collection indefinitely, without direct communication with the artist. Berwick Film Festival 2025 celebrates the start of a year of their Endless Love Tapes project which tests the potential for Clarke’s Love Tapes to grow endlessly. Endless Love Tapes at Berwick Film Festival – managed by Wendy Clarke and Kim Coleman – is the first in a year-long pilot project which gives a series of communities to make new Love Tapes.  Click here for more information about this exhibition >>>

    37 min

  2. 09/10/2025

    A Conversation with Conal McStravick – BFMAF 2025

    Art Historian Theo Gordon talks to artist, educator and writer Conal McStravick about their Propositions Programme, shown at BFMAF 2025. Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) Director: Stuart MarshallYear: 2024Kaposi’s Sarcoma (A Plague and its Symptoms) is a 1983 artist’s video on the subject of AIDS, by the LGBTQ+ and AIDS video artist and TV documentarian Stuart Marshall (1949-1993). Presumed lost and unseen for almost 40 years, this 25-minute video (of the original 28 minutes) is likely to be the first AIDS activist video in the global archive. Robert Marshall Director: Stuart MarshallYear: 1991Robert Marshall is structured in two movements. Through the memories of his father, fragments of the son’s youth are revealed, forming both a biographical portrait of Robert and an autobiographical portrait of Stuart Marshall. The second sequence stages Marshall’s AIDS alternative health regimen of herbal and acupuncture treatments with a recording of a telephone conversation between Stuart and an HIV physician in San Francisco. The pros and cons of the drug AZT are discussed long-distance. The video offers a poignant yet politicised meditation on memory and trauma, community knowledge and medical ethics. Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    29 min

  3. 09/10/2025

    Q&A with Marion Scemama – BFMAF 2025

    A conversation with filmmaker Marion Scemama about the films shown in her Essential Cinema programme at BFMAF 2025. Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    41 min

  4. 09/10/2025

    Q&A with Eri Makihara – Listen – BFMAF 2025

    Artist and Curator Hannah Wallis talks to filmmaker Eri Makihara about her film Listen, that was shown at BFMAF 2025. This Q&A was delivered with Japanese Sign Language, British Sign Language, English Live Captions and spoken English. The Sign Language interpreters were Christy Dodds, Chisato Minamimura, Dee Savage and Aki Takizawa. The recording contains some level of audio interference due to the translation software being used during the Q&A. ⁠Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    26 min

  5. 09/10/2025

    Q&A with Eri Makihara – BFMAF 2025

    Artist and Curator Hannah Wallis talks to filmmaker Eri Makihara about her films Dream of My Mother and The Tanaka Family, that were shown at BFMAF 2025. This Q&A was delivered with Japanese Sign Language, British Sign Language, English Live Captions and spoken English. The Sign Language interpreters were Christy Dodds, Chisato Minamimura, Dee Savage and Aki Takizawa. The recording contains some level of audio interference due to the translation software being used during the Q&A. Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    17 min

  6. 09/10/2025

    Q&A with Morgan Quaintance & Laura Harris – BFMAF 2025

    Artist Chiemi Shimeda talks to filmmaker Morgan Quaintance and cultural sociologist Laura Harris about Quaintance's film Available Light. Available Light Director: Morgan Quaintance Year: 2025Available Light explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society. Comprising interviews with workers at the Edo Tokyo Open Air Architecture Museum in Tokyo, and fragments of conversations with renters in that city and London, a productive dialectic opens between the museum’s preserved historical ideal of the domestic and the often unsettling realities of temporary accommodation in modern cities. Combining trademark immersive sound design with impressionistic images and abstractions, Quaintance crafts an austere, oneiric and subtly affecting portrait of residential precarity. Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    31 min

  7. 09/10/2025

    A Conversation with Ayanna Dozier – BFMAF 2025

    BFMAF programmer Myriam Mouflih talks to filmmaker Ayanna Dozier about her BFMAF 2025 In Focus programme. Click here for more information about this programme >>>

    55 min

  8. 09/09/2025

    Q&A with Rajee Samarasinghe – BFMAF 2025

    BFMAF programmer Alice Miller talks to filmmaker Rajee Samarasinghe about his feature film, Your Touch Makes Others Invisible, that opened the 20th edition of BFMAF. Your Touch Makes Others Invisible Director: Rajee SamarasingheYear: 2025When a supernatural entity plagues a village community in war torn Northern Sri Lanka, a mother loses her son. Set in militarily occupied territory marked by 26 years of civil war, this hybrid docufiction made collaboratively, and secretly, with impacted Tamil communities lyrically examines the stories of missing people. A potent, elliptical protest poem moving with grace and purpose between disparate cinematic forms. Click here for more information >>>

    22 min
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About

A series of conversations with artists & filmmakers participating in the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF), from the 16th edition of the festival in 2020 to the most recent, 20th, edition in 2025. BFMAF is an organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image based in Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the border of England and Scotland. The Festival leads through collaboration and research, with a resolute commitment to peer support, artistic production and community development. The Festival is recognised for its innovative programming and critical engagement.

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