Berwick 2025: Round Here

Marking its 20th anniversary this edition (March 27–30, 2025), Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has established itself as one of the UK’s most boundary-defying festivals for the moving image. Its program challenges formal divisions between fiction and nonfiction and remains deeply engaged with the radical politics of representation through a hybrid selection of experimental cinema, artist’s moving image, and militant nonfiction. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. No more than two screenings run concurrently, encouraging sustained attention and conversation. In 2021, the New Cinema Competition was retired and replaced by the New Cinema Awards—a non-competitive strand in which all selected artists receive a substantial screening fee.

Its remarkable hybrid spirit may well be shaped by the town’s own complex geographical history. Berwick-upon-Tweed, England’s northernmost town, sits just a few miles from the Scottish border and has been traded more than a dozen times between England and Scotland in a centuries-long political and economic tug-of-war. This year, the festival turns its gaze toward the historic violence embedded in the town’s very foundations. When I spoke to festival director Peter Taylor, he pointed out the complexity of the town’s history: the King’s Own Scottish Borderers were stationed in Berwick but served as colonial forces abroad, including in historic Palestine during the British Mandate and across Southeast Asia in Singapore and Myanmar during the Second World War. The festival found meaningful exchange within such contradictions by programming its Fanon Focus series within the new Barracks cinema, housed in what was once the mob store of the first purpose-built military barracks in the UK. 

Other venues also pay homage to the political activists who have shaped the town. St. Peace Aidan’s Church, which was set up by a Christian minister who was a pacifist and environmental activist, contained the 100 Strings exhibition featuring short filmic gestures made in homage to Palestinian poet Refaat Alarer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike last year. As the festival moves beyond its teenage years, it looks to the future by reflecting on the prismatic and fragmentary nature of the past through a program of 63 films. The films were divided into five strands: the New Cinema Awards; the Focus program; Propositions, which showcases new works incorporating performative elements; and Essential Cinema, a reparative strand dedicated to reviving overlooked archival films. Rather than simply spotlighting peripheral histories, the program confronted the inevitable gaps, contradictions, and erasures within historical narratives. It asks how cinema might not only recover but also re-stage these absences. Many of the featured works explore the body’s mnemonic capacities—how gesture, movement, and touch might commune with history, or reimagine how to engage with the unknowable.

Many of these concerns coalesce in works like Kaori Oda’s Underground (2024), where the body becomes both a conduit and a question in the excavation of fragmentary histories. Over the past few years, Japanese artist-filmmaker Kaori Oda has turned her camera toward subterranean landscapes across Japan, Mexico, and Bosnia as spaces of refuge, mysticism, labor, and tragedy. The film marks a loose end to her trilogy with Aragane (2015) and Cenote (2019). Underground repurposes much of the footage from her previous works, particularly her medium-length documentary Gama (2023) and a short 2022 installation work set in Sapporo. Unlike the series’ earlier documentary works, Underground adopts a more overtly fictional and speculative approach, blending fiction and nonfiction to explore the role of caves (gamas) during the Battle of Okinawa. 

The film traces the archipelago’s history through two central characters: dancer and artist Nao Yoshigai and the cave guide Mitsuo Matsunaga. Matsunaga composes almost all the dialogue of the film, recounting the accounts of survivors who hid in gamas when American forces arrived on the island. His account shifts in registers: from a more distanced third-person objective account recounting the mass suicide in the Chibichiri Gama to a harrowing retelling of the survivor Toshie Asato’s testimony, with details of her child dying due to starvation. Matsunaga recounts these histories while guiding Yoshigai, and the viewer, through the caves, a tunnel of stalagmites behind him. While his narration may initially resemble conventional documentary testimony, his oscillation from an empirical narrative to the near embodiment of another person’s memory in his perfectly memorized performance transforms his own body into a conduit for collective memory. 

The biggest difference from Gama is Yoshigai’s expanded role, who counterposes the orality of Matsunaga as the film’s “shadow”—a silent, phantasmagoric guide who moves slowly through these conflicted landscapes, touching history quite literally with her hands: a cave wall, the large body of a tree, coral formations on the beach, fossils and human bones found on cave floors. In a recurring refrain, the shadow of her outstretched hand lingers across the knobbles and crags of stone, until her physical body briefly appears, laying her palm flat against the rock’s surface. This gesture recalls the prehistoric tradition of negative hands cave art. Oda complicates this act of touch. Where the negative hands are indexical vestiges of an inexplicable past, Yoshigai’s shadow-hand marks her immediate corporeal presence. Refracted through Oda’s 16mm film, the shadow-hand is marked via the elemental touch of light on celluloid—a temporally dense double imprint of Yoshigai’s presence. Underground negotiates with the past as living matter, resonant and reactive within its subterranean spaces. In Oda’s haptic poem, the arrival of light is always accompanied by its shadows. 

London-based film curator Abiba Coulibaly’s lecture performance Black & Arab Encounters on Screen engages with performance through both its format and its content. The performance examines the visionary possibilities and contradictions within the Pan-African movement from the late 1960s to the present day, tracing strong lines of solidarity between Black and Arab anti-colonial struggles in the 1970s and their post-revolutionary fractures through a complex assemblage of archival clips ranging from newsreels to documentaries and TV dramas. Coulibaly refers to the contradictions within some 21st-century cinematic encounters, where Black characters are often stereotypically presented against their Arab counterparts. Out of Coulibaly’s many rich references, two moments of conflict are particularly striking: in Tunisian domestic drama The Season of Men (2000) by feminist director Moufida Tlatli, the Black female character is posited as a mute domestic worker. Even in Med Hondo’s Fatima, The Algerian Woman of Dakar (2004)—a Fanonian allegory of radical Pan-African union—the union itself is troubled: the titular Algerian protagonist’s marriage to the Senegalese Souleymane is overshadowed by their first encounter, in which Souleymane rapes Fatima.

The lecture concludes with British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s Roadworks (1985), a performance video shot on the vibrant streets of Brixton, a historically Black and working-class neighborhood, where we see Hatoum walking barefoot, a pair of black Dr. Martens boots tied to her ankles. In the 6-minute performance, Hatoum slowly places one foot in front of the other, dragging the boots along the pavement. The boots, historically worn both by UK police and by skinheads associated with racial violence, anchor the performance in the charged context of the 1981 and 1985 Brixton uprisings and the systemic police repression in the area.

Hatoum’s laborious movements are coupled with frequent aerial, surveillance-style shots to emphasize a state of control in which her body appears exposed and inhibited. Coulibaly chooses to end her own performance with Hatoum’s cross-relational gesture of solidarity. Tracing her own body’s ability to embody the ruptures of history, Hatoum carries the autobiographical weight of exile as a displaced Palestinian, denied the right to entry and movement in her homeland, while also situating herself within the topographical logics of surveillance imposed on racialized bodies in south London. 

Similarly, the focus on American filmmaker and writer Ayanna Dozier’s work at the festival similarly foregrounds an embodied cartography of a New York City that no longer exists, delineated through the movements of sex workers. This focus particularly comes through in Dozier’s Super-8 short, Bounded Intimacy (2024). A voyeuristic bird’s-eye lens follows two women as they walk through Tribeca and Chelsea, neighborhoods historically known for their “pay-for-play” hotels and sex clubs, mapping their presence against the glossy, lacquered surfaces of a now-gentrified city. Through their movement, Dozier attempts to excavate the erotic histories that linger beneath the city’s polished veneer. 

In the film’s opening sequence, the camera positions the viewer as an elevated voyeur, before cutting to the street, where the women turn toward the lens, posing and returning the gaze. Dozier complicates the power dynamics of looking: while the city surveils and suppresses the visible traces of sex work, the power embedded in voyeurism is also reclaimed by the women themselves. Their gestures are deliberate, reflexive—stirring the scopophilic pleasure of the viewer, who remains caught in a doubled gaze, at once complicit and captivated.

The body as a linguistic tool is explored in the work of Japanese Deaf artist Eri Makihara, whose films were shown outside of Asia for the first time at Berwick. The festival marked this milestone with a Focus program dedicated to three of Makihara’s documentary and fiction work. In her debut documentary Listen (2016), Makihara asks what it might mean to listen with the eyes and the body—a question that first emerged after she attended a sign language poetry workshop led by Shizue Sazawa, where she was struck by the visual musicality of the form. Listen is a collaborative experiment in articulating what Makihara calls a “music for Deaf people”. Co-directed by Makihara and Deaf Butoh dancer Dakei, the film arose from extended conversations between the directors and their d/Deaf participants, which push beyond hearing definitions of sound and resonance. 

In Listen, Makihara foregrounds the idea that d/Deaf music emerges from the body’s phenomenological attunement to the surrounding landscapes. Across several musical performance sequences, individual performers move expressively through striking landscapes—by the ocean, on sunlit Tokyo rooftops, and in empty studios. Experiments with harmony unfold spatially: in one scene, two performers engage in a kind of visual polyphony, playing with distance and depth of field, synchrony, and desynchrony. 

Makihara and Dakei also reconsider what music might mean in cinematic terms. At times, the camera holds a static frame, letting the performers’ movements unfold within it; at others, it spins with them in frenzied motion, blurring the landscape into a visual rhythm that matches the intensity of bodily gesture. This dynamic choreography between camera and performer creates a sensory experience attuned a polyrhythmic movement. The festival’s access measures for the Makihara Focus were commendable too – with two British Sign Language interpreters who respectively translated audience questions and Makihara’s response in Japanese Sign Language, while also including English live-captioning on screen.

One of my most memorable cinematic experiences at this year’s festival was watching Robina Rose’s newly restored Nightshift (1981) in Berwick’s own Maltings Cinema, which will soon close for renovations until 2027. It’s hard not to feel a tinge of sadness at the impending disappearance of the Maltings’ kitschy crystal chandeliers and regal red theatre, which feel like a direct extension of the scarlet hotel lobby in the Portobello Hotel of Rose’s brilliant and wry experimental fiction film. 

Sharing a kinship with Chantal Akerman’s Hôtel Monterey (1973), Nightshift similarly unfolds over the course of a single night in an oneiric place of passage and drift, where guests appear as fleeting, vampiric presences. But where Akerman’s camera remains mostly observational, its ghostly gaze detached and uninhabited, Nightshift often shares the perspective of the hotel’s night receptionist, played by punk icon Jordan (AKA Pamela Rooke, who is also the star of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee [1978]). Face painted white, eyes upturned beneath the glow of a shell-shaped lamp, she watches the hotel’s peculiar procession: leather-clad young men, a bourgeois sorceress, a magician. From the perspective behind the counter, Rose creates a comical divide between guests and workers. She remains in restless attendance for those who drift up and down the elevator, and wander dramatically down the stairs. 

Hotel lobbies at night are magical meeting spaces for the inebriated, the lonely, or just the plain eccentric. What marks out the central spectral, somnambulist atmosphere is the unsettled corporeal movement of the guests. They are untethered and reckless in a space where they have no history, engaging in fiery occult seances, blabbing their entire intimate relationship history on the public telephone, or ordering copious bottles of champagne throughout the night. Rose’s film gestures towards Notting Hill in its multiplicity: as the center of London’s underground art scene, home to Afro-Caribbean communities, as well as the inherited mansions of the landed gentry. Now, the film bears the ghosts not only of its inhabitants but also of a neighborhood that has become progressively more gentrified, where the hotel now only refers to its Bohemian past as part of its nostalgic advertisement. 

Beyond the films, attending a “micro-festival” like Berwick, one is attuned to the potential of multiple bodies sharing a singular space. With at most 300 people in each screening,  dialogue between filmmakers, artists, curators, and writers emerges naturally between screenings, over fish ’n’ chips, and on cliffside walks. These informal exchanges often carry the most urgency, where the limits and possibilities of cinema are considered not just in terms of form, but of ethics, access, and off-screen political solidarity. In this setting, the festival becomes less about spectacle and more about encounter. Berwick’s smallness is not a constraint, but a condition that allows something rare to take shape: a space where attention lingers, where dialogue doesn't dissipate, where artists are compensated fairly, and where the body—on screen, in space, in relation—remains central.

Cici Peng is a London-based film writer and film curator. She is a programmer for Sine Screen, a film collective that curates moving-image works by East Asian and South East Asian artists.