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"A preface for the unfamiliar. Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is a small, strange and very special film festival situated in the northernmost place in England, the quite lovely Berwick-upon-Tweed, a small, much contested coastal town on the Scottish border that is home to a set of impressive defensive walls, Britain’s earliest barracks building, some nice pubs and a few good fish and chip shops that close at 5pm. Inaugurated in 2005, the town’s film festival—a five day affair that consists of a mixture of short films and features exhibited in the town’s single cinema, performances elsewhere, and installations placed in historic sites along the town walls—has a reputation that entirely precedes its scale, understood as a place to discover and engage with challenging, complex work in locations befitting of the idiosyncratic offering. Since 2015, under the eclectic curatorship of former International Film Festival Rotterdam programmer Peter Taylor, that reputation has only grown. The competitive strand Berwick New Cinema—launched in the same year and increasing incrementally in size and confidence in the editions since—contains films of a quality and rarity above and beyond the festival’s perceived stature."