This year the Berwick Arts & Media Festival will take place online for the first time. Those who know the festival, will miss its unique setting for screenings and installations across beautifully located Berwick-upon-Tweed on the Northern English coast just south of the border to Scotland. But with its online version the festival will give access to audiences all across the UK and show its programme for three weeks instead of just a few days. And what's even better, the festival pass to watch its international selection of features and shorts, of discussions and conversations is only £ 7.50.
The Goethe-Institut is pleased to support a number of films at the festival. After welcoming Ulrike Ottinger to the Goethe-Institut in January this year we are delighted that her autobiographical documentary Paris Caligrammes, which premiered to much acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival this year, will be screening. It is also a pleasure to see that the festival picked the Hindi classic Badman Bast by Prem Kapoor, which was recently found in the archives of the Arsenal Institute of Film and Video. In the New Cinema section you find the latest film by the filmmaking duo Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky, who share their time between Berlin and Paris. Don't Rush explores the reverberations of early Greek counterculture among young people today through the tradition of Rebetiko songs, which celebrate the effects of Hashish. Also showing in the New Cinema strand is the experimental short Liquid Stranger by Cologne-based filmmaker Stefan Ramírez Pérez, which combines language, narrative, and performance to tell a story of murder and obsession.
All Films are screening online until Sunday 11 October 2020.
Ulrike Ottinger: Paris Caligramme
In a rich torrent of archival audio and visuals, paired with extracts from her own artworks and films, Ottinger resurrects the old Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Latin Quarter. Amongst their literary cafés and jazz clubs, she revisits encounters with Jewish exiles; life with her artistic community; the world views of Parisian ethnologists and philosophers; the political upheavals of the Algerian War and May 1968; and the legacy of the colonial era.
Prem Kapoor: Badman Basti
Briefly released in 1971 and subsequently lost for decades until its rediscovery in 2019, Badnam Basti is the debut feature of Indian New Wave filmmaker Prem Kapoor. His artfully hewn, musical melodrama, traces a circular relationship between its two men and a woman.
Elise Florenty & Marcel Türkowsky: Don't Rush
Three young men—two brothers and their cousin—meet on a dense summer night to feel the “high” of a dozen “Hasiklidika” songs; Rebetiko songs from the beginning of the 20th century which celebrate the effects of Hashish. But beyond the pleasures of drugs, it is here a question of love, of joy and sadness, a search for freedom and political commitment.
Stefan Ramírez Pérez: Liquid Stranger
A knife suspended in the air, a PVC trench coat, a slick of red lipstick and multiple stories of murder and obsession all become signifying agents in this experimental, camp mash-up of language, narrative and performance.
Back
