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. This commitment to dismantling hierarchies extends to the festival’s structure. 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: Underground, Black & Arab Encounters on Screen, Bounded Intimacy, an Eri Makihara program, and Nightshift.
Berwick
Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival takes place in Berwick-upon-Tweed, the most northerly town in England, resting near the border to Scotland and
The question of how to build a more open and equitable film festival is an old and still pressing concern. Ideally, there will be a plurality of answers and the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival may be one of them. Its 2024 edition, which ran 7–10 March, felt like a festival whose program was not only deeply engaged with larger political struggles, but also open and malleable in a way that many festivals claim but rarely enact in the relations underpinning the screenings.