Community Events
Community Events
Screenings in Spittal
Martins the Printers
Monday 24 to Thursday 27
Primary Business Sponsor Martins the Printers will be showing the film Come With Me to Berwick-upon-Tweed, which features Martins’ property in 1950 when it was the Thomas Black & Sons spade works, a company that moved to Spittal in the 1850s. This film can also be seen along with other archival films of local interest at the Maltings cinema on Wednesday 26 at 18.30.
The Mobile Cinema
Dates, times and exact venues to be announced
Bringing cinema to those who would not usually have access to it, the mobile cinema will once again be visiting a number of towns and villages on both sides of the border. Seahouses, Wooler, Coldingham and Wylam will see a specially selected programme from this year’s Festival. Schools Programme.
Primary-schools screening
Komaneko – The Curious Cat
Maltings cinema
Wednesday 26 10.00
Japan, 2006, 59 min
Colour, 35mm
No dialogue (some Japanese voiceover with English subtitles)
Suitable for children (and adults) aged 4 onwards
dir/scr: Tsuneo Goda
prod: Noriko Matsumoto, Naoko Watanabe
international sales: dwarf inc.
Komachan is a kind-hearted kitten living with her grandfather in a house on top of a hill. She loves creating little adventures for her favourite doll and, with boundless imagination and talent, sets out to make her very own animation film. In a series of five episodes, Komaneko charts her successes and disappointments with tenderness, humour and hardly any dialogue except the occasional ‘meow’.
This unbelievably cute film has been a huge hit in Japan and would delight children and adults everywhere. It may have caught the attention of animation fans for its beautiful (and playfully accurate) portrayal of a stop-motion animated character making a stop-motion animated film, but Komaneko owes its success first and foremost to its gorgeous charm. Come and be enchanted.
Secondary-schools screening
We Shall Overcome (Drømmen)Maltings cinema
Wednesday 26 14.00
Denmark, 2006, 109 min
Colour, 35mm
Danish, with English subtitles
dir: Niels Arden Oplev
scr: Niels Arden Oplev, Steen Bille
prod: Sisse Graum Jørgensen
cast: Bent Mejding, Janus Dissing Rathke, Anders W.
Berthelsen, Jens Jørn Spottag, Anne-Grethe Bjarup Riis,
Peter Hesse Overgaard, Sarah Juel Werner
print source: The Independent Cinema Office
It’s 1969 in provincial Denmark and 13-year-old Frits is being bullied by his brutal headmaster as well as trying to cope with his father’s breakdown and keep his family together. Listening to records of Martin Luther King’s speeches gives Frits the inspiration to fight back at the old-world repressive regimes at work in his community and spread the winds of change. This award-winning family film is beautifully acted and sensitively directed, full of exquisite moments both painful and pleasurable and with a central character that we are rooting for all the way.
Schools Workshops
Silent Movies Workshop with Janine Sack and Rebecca Milling
Monday 24 and Tuesday 25
This workshop uses silent movies to inspire young adults to use expressionist filmic language to create their own short films. Artists Janine Sack and Rebecca Milling will collaborate with a small group of students to develop scenes derived from their own personal experiences and recreate them as silent dramas using exaggerated movements and expressions, which they will perform, film and edit. The short films made during the two-day workshop will then be premiered during the last day of the Festival.
Janine Sack is a visual artist based in Berlin. She graduated in visual communications at the HfbK in Hamburg and completed postgraduate studies at the Royal Art College in Stockholm. In 2003, she was awarded the European Media Artists in Residence Exchange (EMARE), Dundee and in 2004 took part in Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt artIT, Berlin. Janine Sack‘s artwork Virtual Fear will feature as part of this year’s Artist Trail. For more information see page 46.
Rebecca Milling is a visual artist based in Edinburgh who mainly works with photography and performance to camera. Rebecca has experience of facilitating workshops with members of the community in conjunction with galleries such as Stills in Edinburgh and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Rebecca also works with internationally acclaimed artists to produce large-scale video installations.
Animation Workshops
Maltings hall
Thursday 27 Session 1 9.00 – 12.00 Session 2 13.00 – 16.00
This introduction to animation involves designing and making your own characters and making short films using a camera and computer. Techniques include 2-D cut-out, 3-D model (claymation) and drawn animation. To help and guide you are experienced animators from Red Kite Animation in Edinburgh.
Visiting Director – Marc Hoeferlin
Shooting Ghosts: The Making of Ghosts
Friday 28
To complement this year’s theme film on film, director Marc Hoeferlin will speak to students about the ‘making of’ film and provide useful insights about breaking into the film industry. The seminar will include screenings and a detailed insight into Marc’s own experiences.
Having finished his film degree at university, Marc Hoeferlin tracked down the documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield at a film festival with the hope of getting to work with him on his next film. Six weeks later, Marc received a call inviting him to shoot The Making of Ghosts. Ghosts is a documentary which sets out to explore the workings of the invisible immigration economy following the Morcambe Bay disaster in which a group of Chinese cockle-pickers lost their lives.
Shooting Ghosts developed into a film of its own, documenting Broomfield’s unorthodox style of filmmaking and exploring the issues raised in the film by following him through his initial research trips, casting, and filming.
Young Filmmakers – Education Screening
The Chris Anderson Award
Saturday 29 16.00
This year the Festival launches a competition to encourage young people in filmmaking and to identify promising new talent with a special award. The competition is open to under 18s from both sides of the border. Winners will be announced following the screening of shortlisted films.
This competition commemorates the life of Chris Anderson who was an active supporter of both the Festival and young filmmaking.
The programme will be followed by the premiere of the short films made by students during the Silent Movies Workshop with Janine Sack and Rebecca Milling.Around the Festival
Around the festival
Berwick Rising
Berwick Rising is a project involving artists and teachers from Berwick schools, who are working together to reinvigorate their own creativity using the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival as a starting point for inspiration. The project is part of ‘enquire’, a national research initiative designed to explore the benefits of learning in galleries.
Over three days, artists and teachers will be visiting the Festival and making a creative response to what they’ve seen. Awareness-raising workshops on aspects of digital media will be geared to teachers’ needs. The artists taking part are Neil Bromwich, Lindsay Duncanson, Kelly Richardson and John Quinn. You can follow how they get on by looking at their Facebook entry www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17559140816.
Isis Arts is an independent arts organisation founded by arts graduates with a passion for lens-based media and a shared belief in the power of art to reveal identity. Isis is committed to producing challenging work of exceptional quality that is accessible to diverse audiences but most importantly is artist-led. Isis Arts is the Arts in Education Agency for Northumberland. ‘enquire’ represents a consortium of gallery educators, artists, teachers and researchers across England.Photographs made using large pinhole cameras
Peter Richards uses a room-sized pinhole camera to take pictures of everyday public life and re-enacted events, capturing people, landmarks, the landscape and documenting events on a life-size scale. He will doing this throughout the town and at events during the Festival, creating a series of large images. The photographs will be exhibited at the Gymnasium Gallery from 6 October to 4 November.
READesign
The Parade
Saturday 29 (full day)
A mobile design exhibition inspired by
books touring Northumberland
As part of Design Event ’07, Inspire has commissioned a mobile design exhibition; READesign in collaboration with curator Charlie Arnold and the Keelrow Bookshop in North Shields. The exhibition will be housed and transported in a removal van – the original concept stemmed from the mobile library.
Three designers (Fiona Thompson, Michael Armstrong and Ellen Bell) have designed an ‘iconic’ domestic item in white so that their selected images and text from a range of antiquarian books can be projected onto the work. A fourth artist/designer working in projection, Lindsay Duncanson, will translate the imagery and project onto the objects. It is intended by projecting historical images onto contemporary objects to visually express the research and importance of the book that has been absorbed by contemporary designers and has influenced the type of work they make today.
Moving Images (2)
Irving Gallery, 25 Bridge Street
Sunday 23 12.00 – 16.00
Monday 24 to Saturday 29 10.30 – 17.00
The second movie-related exhibition of
paintings and drawings by Nick Holmes and Jane McCracken.
Berwick Library
During the Festival, Berwick Library will display a selection of cinematic literature, including books about film and cinema, and original novels adapted for the screen. The Library’s selection of DVDs will also be complemented by a recommended viewing list compiled by the Festival’s programmer Tamara Van Strijthem.
Berwick Library is located in Walkergate in the centre of town, and is wheelchair accessible. The closest parking is across the road in Chapel Street.
For opening times visit www.berwick-upon-tweed.gov.uk/arts/arts-and-leisure.htm
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