Events (W.C. 27 February)

1.Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (3-5 March)

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is an artistically ambitious organisation for new cinema and artists’ moving image based in North Northumberland on the English border with Scotland.

A work in progress, leading through collaboration, it has a resolute commitment to the mutual development of the artists, audiences, filmmakers and programmers that make the festival possible.

The 18th edition of Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival takes place from Friday 3 – Sunday 5 March 2023 in Berwick-upon Tweed.

The Festival’s New Cinema Awards champion filmmakers who push against boundaries of genre, form and convention, disarming expectations and enlivening our relationship with cinema. Rather than offering a single prize, chosen by a jury, since 2020 the awards have been jointly shared by all selected filmmakers.

Find more information on the Schedule HERE, and tickets and passes HERE

2. Reflections and Refractions: Gender on Screen

With the release of Saim Sadiq’s ground-breaking Joyland at the end of the month, February gives us an opportunity to reflect on how gender has been previously presented and received in on-screen narratives worldwide. With this in mind, we bring you a season that invites you to reflect on cinema’s inclusive good intentions and refract from narrow-minded portrayals.

Kickstarting in sixties Japan, Toshio Matsumoto’s Funeral Parade of Roses launches us in at the deep end, exploding onto screens with no sense of inhibition. This is followed up with Brian De Palma’s controversial Dressed To Kill, then Sally Potter’s free-spirited Orlando, and finally Alexandra-Therese Keining’s gender-switching fantasy drama Girls Lost.

This season has been curated by Harriet Taylor (organiser of Bristol Trans & Non-Binary Creatives), who will be introducing each of these screenings with an opportunity to discuss the film in the Café & Bar afterwards. She will also hosting the director Q&A preview for Joyland on Thu 9 Feb.

Harriet runs SWITCH: an organisation bringing inclusive cinema to the big screen, with a focus on the trans/non-binary experience.

More information can be found HERE

3. Glasgow Short Film Festival, 22-26 March

Glasgow Short Film Festival, the largest competitive short film festival in Scotland, champions new film talent by providing an annual showcase and meeting point for new and established Scottish and international filmmakers, industry delegates and the local audience. Our programme celebrates diverse forms of cinematic expression, whether fiction, documentary, animation or artists’ moving image, and foregrounds disruptive, ground-breaking work that transgresses the boundaries of conventional narrative film.

GSFF is a friendly and inclusive festival in which the work of emerging Scottish filmmakers is presented in the context of an international programme. We believe that international collaboration is vital for Scottish filmmakers. GSFF not only advocates the importance of short film in progressing future generations of filmmakers, but provides the meeting-place where collaboration can begin.

GSFF’s core programme comprises international and Scottish competitions. New talent is supported through a programme of learning and networking events, including panel discussions, workshops and one-to-one sessions. GSFF curates unique special programmes on particular movements or filmmakers of international importance, and hosts parties and live performances throughout the festival week.

Find more information on the Programme HERE

4. Reaching New Audiences

Giving you the tools to welcome more people into your organisation. 

This brand-new one-day event is an opportunity for you to think differently about who your audiences are and who they could be. It focuses on groups who are largely under-represented in our audiences; those with disabilities (visible and invisible), young people, and people of colour. 

Reaching New Audiences compliments Inclusivity & Audiences Day. It has been created in response to a need for an event that looks at the practical application of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) techniques.  

When & where?

Reaching New Audiences will take place on Thursday 16 March 2023. Originally billed as an in-person event, due to train strikes being held on this date Reaching New Audiences will now be held online via Zoom.

The day explores practical approaches to the principles of audience development. You will interrogate your current approach, identifying which audiences you’re not welcoming and how to adapt what you’re doing to meet their needs. 

During the day you will create a working plan to help you develop and diversify your audiences. You’ll leave inspired to commit long-term to making our cultural organisations more welcoming and inclusive spaces. 

Find more information on the event HERE

5. Essay Film Festival

The Essay Film Festival returns in March with a wide-ranging selection of formally ambitious and politically engaged films of past and present. 

The festival takes place 25-31 March, with screenings and events at the ICA and Birkbeck Cinema, and additional special events at the BFI and other venues.

Lebanese artist Rania Stephan’s intimate conversational portrait of Syrian writer and activist Samar Yazbek explores the limits of language in the face of atrocity and displacement, while her Beirut street-scenes and her mixing of private and public archives ask important questions about memory and witnessing.

The inherent violence of colonialism and its cultural legacies are examined by Med Hondo’s essay on the lives of immigrant workers in France and by Assia Djebar’s poetic reworking of archive images shot in the Maghreb.

Innovative and creative approaches to anthropological investigation are proposed by Ruchir Joshi’s study of Bengal’s traditional wandering musicians and by Jocelyne Saab’s lovingly crafted portrayals of Egypt in a time of transition.

A new essay film by Lis Rhodes combines aesthetic complexity and social analysis, while a collaboration between researcher Ian Christie and filmmaker Chiemi Shimada casts a fresh eye on Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s time spent in Mexico in 19

Find the Programme HERE

6. I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) + Q&A

Genesis Cinema, Date & time :Sat 4 Mar, 6:15pm

Join Genesis Cinema and Birds Eye View for a special Women’s History Month screening of the exhilarating, poignant debut feature I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking), followed by a Q&A with filmmaker/lead actress Kelley Kali. Presented in partnership with, and hosted by Reclaim The Frame.

This is post-pandemic America and everyone is struggling to get by. Danny, a recently widowed woman, barely makes ends meet by braiding hair and making deliveries on roller skates. Having convinced her 8 year old daughter they are ‘camping out’ in a tent for fun (in a nod to Life is Beautiful), she manages to save enough money for a down-payment on a new apartment. When a client is unable to pay her, she realizes that if she can’t raise $200 by day’s end she will lose the apartment and have to admit to her daughter that they are actually “houseless”. What follows is an intense, manic and frayed day until the final reckoning.

In a world where we need more underrepresented voices telling their own stories, this movie hits the mark.

Book your tickets HERE

7. Dochouse: Ladies Only 

Bertha Dochouse; Date & time: Wed 8 Mar, 6:30pm

Dir: Rebana Liz John; Germany / India / 2021 / 79mins

Celebrate International Women’s Day with Ladies Only at Bertha DocHouse. An insightful and rare documentary about the views, hopes and struggles of ordinary women travelling on the rush-hour ‘Ladies Only’ carriages to and from the hyper-frenetic megalopolis of Mumbai. An engrossing and must-see documentary.

‘What makes you angry?’ a filmmaker asks a woman traveller in the ‘Ladies Only’ compartments of Mumbai local trains running in and out of the main stations. The answers to this and many other questions are both insightful and surprising, highlighting the issues, hopes and struggles of womanhood in India today, especially in the face of the frenetic non-stop Mumbai lifestyle. The changing light, faces and languages creates a poetic rhythm flowing through this engrossing and must-see documentary.

Book your tickets HERE

8. International Women’s Day Profession: Documentarist

Lexi Cinema; Date & time: Wed 8 Mar, 7:00pm

• Runtime: 80 minutes
• Director: Sepideh Abtahi, Shirin Barghnavard, Mina Keshavarz, Firouzeh Khosrovani, Nahid Rezaei, Sahar Salahshoor, Farahnaz Sharifi
• Year: 2014
• Language: Farsi
• Subtitled
• Rating: (TBC)

Join Lexi Cinema on International Women’s Day for an Iranian documentary special. Profession: Documentarist brings together a plurality of voices from a group of female Iranian documentary filmmakers reflecting upon contemporary Iran, how it has been shaped by its past, and what they hope for its future.

For International Women’s Day, Lexi Cinema pays tribute and extends their solidarity to the women of Iran who are bravely leading a movement against a brutal regime, following the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (Mahsa) Amini, after being arrested by the morality police for wearing “improper” hijab. Since then, nationwide protests have erupted with video footage circulating globally of women and schoolgirls cutting their hair, removing their hijabs and chanting slogans of mass resistance against the regime.

The film Profession: Documentarist, explores the importance, and also the risk, of documenting and filmmaking in Iran, especially during times of social and political unrest. Consisting of seven short films, together they reveal how the political and the personal are so closely intertwined.

Book your tickets HERE

9. Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time 2022

Film critics, programmers and curators from around the world compile a poll of the greatest films ever made.

‘The arrival of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles at the top of the 2022 Sight and Sound poll signals an amazing shift in critical taste.’
– Laura Mulvey, Sight and Sound, Winter 22/23

In 1952, the team at the BFI’s film culture magazine Sight and Sound had the novel idea of asking critics to name the greatest films of all time. The tradition became decennial, increasing in size and prestige as the decades passed. The Sight and Sound poll is now a major bellwether of critical opinion on cinema and this edition – its eighth – was its largest ever, with 1,639 participating critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics each submitting their top ten ballot.

January saw us journey from 100 (or joint 95 for five films) through to 66. The second part of the season counts down titles from joint 63rd to joint 31st place, amongst them some of cinema’s most towering and influential works, as well as modern masterpieces which have found immediate acclaim. Raucous comedies are nestled alongside powerful explorations of desire, faith and fear, each a vital work that cries out to be seen on the big screen.

The last part is bookended by change, by way of two films by female directors: Céline Sciamma’s striking period romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire at no. 30 (also the most recently made film in the top 100) and Chantal Akerman’s radical masterpiece in first place, (usurping 2012’s winner Vertigo). In between, there are long-anointed classics (some, including Apocalypse Now and Man With a Movie Camera even showing in Imax) along with new faces (such as Do the Right Thing) that joined their ranks this year. Don’t miss the chance to see as many as you can. You may even want to join the game and compile your own list.

Stuart Brown, BFI Head of Programme and Acquisitions and Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound managing editor

See the films screening at BFI IMAX.

Find more details HERE

10. Rye Lane + Q&A with director Raine Allen-Miller and actor Vivian Oparah

• DirectorRaine Allen-Miller
• WithDavid Jonsson, Vivian Oparah
• UK 2022. 82min
• Digital
• CertificateTbc
• A Searchlight Pictures Release

A hilarious feel-good comedy and irresistible love letter to south London, Raine Allen-Miller’s feature film directorial debut is a smash.

While coping with a particularly brutal breakup, Dom finds himself wailing in the gender-neutral toilets of a friend’s art show. On the other side of the door, asking if he is okay, is Yas, a free-spirited, wannabe costume designer. Their chance meeting is about to lead them into an unpredictable, shenanigan-packed adventure through south London. Raine Allen-Miller’s energetic and playful film pops with visual flair, a rapturous score by musician Kwes and two ridiculously charismatic central performances by David Jonsson and Vivian Oparah. With affectionate nods to big screen romances and beautifully observed moments, Rye Lane is a colourful portrait of our capital. In fact, London has rarely looked so good and falling in love has never been so much fun.

Book your tickets HERE