Hello readers,
So last year I went to Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, and did not write about it, despite writing incoherent and copious notes.This year, I went again, for a shorter visit.
On Saturday, I drove from Hawick to Berwick to watch some films, see some friends; and on Sunday I wake up dreaming.
I dream of flooding and disaster, washed from one island to another, a great wave. Debris. Food just gone. The shape of the land moved, buildings picked up and scattered, room to make shelter,. Soldiers train and are wiped away by crashing beasts, screaming and crying. There’s a gathering by the remains of some docks. Smashed cargo is sorted, bottles of whiskuy emerge, but no food. It’s useless, but we protect if from one another, let our guards down.
I find a kayak, find I have movement around this village on the coast, explore and trade for scraps. I lose my paddle, lose my gloves. Hungry children threaten to drown me. Floating vehicles, things like buses and land rovers transport people, another wave turns them over. A small group climbs a slope, we make shelter in a crumbling barn made of straw. It falls down the hill too.
The broken landscape
a smashed sea
a place of sanctuary lost
the walls long gone
force of rubble and stone
our own little waves
It takes a while to line the two days up.
I thought, when I watched Emilia Beatriz’ Barrunto that I didn’t get it. When I stand on a crumbling, unnamed, possibly Scottish island in my dreams, it starts to make sense a little more. This landscape falling and shifting around my body, a dark sky above. Maybe the experience of watching, masked up as requested, after more coffee than I needed and feeling too warm, too sensitive, took away my intellectual processing, and implanted something other instead. The film doesn’t sit in my memory in a straight line like others do.
A metallic entity scrunches its way towards a fence, a clear boundary, a point of stress (we’re back in the film now), something unsaid but clear, about movement, fragility, physical touching of a place, and distance. Uranus is a character, some kind of blobby being of sparks and wisdom I can’t quite follow, I’m not sure I want to follow. They’re here and somewhere so incredibly far away and lost at the same time.
The sound is too loud. Past, I’m fairly sure, the point of it just being a problem because I do have sensitive hearing. I don’t think it’s the intention, but it changes the single viewing of a work nonetheless. click click click I read the descriptive subtitles to instruct my ears through my hands (I can’t find my earplugs in my bag when I search for them), language I don’t understand bombards me, and some of it must sink in. I guess things are bound to be too loud as the world crumbles.
I’m quite tired, so I’ll leave whatever that was there for now. Other things I appreciated at Berwick were (in the order they’re occurring to me):
The pink bear stickers
The floating statues and the weird butterflies in Reality or Not by Cécile B Evans
The story to Dau:añcut // Moving Along Image by Adam Piron
The absurd comedy and general oddness suddenly making sense at the Q&A with Felix Kelmenson after watching Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts … and also the bird, and the audience watching an audience thing.
The beauty and stillness and movement and utter tragedy of loss in Kamal Aljafari’s UNDR (are those places even there anymore? where are they? tell meeeee)
The music… and the fog in Philip Widmann’s WHAT FOG? – I was hoping actual fog would start drifting over the screen at one stage. Am kind of disappointed it didn’t.
Jessie x
p.s here’s a Link to BFMAF’s website:
https://bfmaf.org
Jessie Growden 