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The 2023 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

At this year’s BFMAF, the lines between documentary and fiction were blurred in productive and challenging ways.

Liminal Spaces: The 2023 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

Appropriately for an event held in a tiny, historic English town just a stone’s throw from the Scottish border, many of the films shown at this year’s Berwick Film & Arts Festival (BFMAF) shared a liminal sensibility, often displaying an unexpected or off-kilter approach to their subjects. Curiosity and openness was usually preferred to explicit messaging, and the lines between documentary and fiction were blurred in productive and challenging ways.

Perhaps the most audacious feat of filmmaking exhibited at this 18th edition of BFMAF was Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio’s 2000 feature Seven Songs from the Tundra, the first-ever narrative film in the Nenets language. The filmmakers created these seven inter-linked fictional vignettes in collaboration with the nomadic Nenets people—most of whom had never encountered cameras or microphones before the film’s production—who Lapsui grew up with, in the large region of Northern Russia to which she’s indigenous.

Against the alien backdrop of the barren, windswept, mosquito-ridden tundra, the film’s simultaneously hyper-local and fabulist tales are able to take on an elemental force of their own. They were filmed in the late 1990s and early 2000s, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, and Lapsui combines detailed observation and fragmented, impressionistic storytelling to show how the hardscrabble lifestyles of these humans are disrupted by the changing whims of history.

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The film’s overarching theme is the gradual encroachment of modern society, and particularly Soviet ideology, into these tight-knit, proudly self-sufficient communities. In one story, parallels are drawn between the Soviet Union’s atheist idolatry of Stalin and Lenin and the Nenets’ own deployment of ritual, symbolism, and myth, while another shows a conflict arising over communist party officials’ forced reappropriation of a tribal leader’s reindeer farm, troubling the notion of anti-capitalist egalitarianism that many see as the heart of the Soviet project.

The most affecting vignette, and one with perhaps the most contemporary relevance, showed a Nenets child being given a new name and forced to attend a mainstream Russian school, with her stoic father powerless and apparently unwilling to resist this traumatic civilizing mission. In an era where Russia’s imperial ambitions are firmly back on the political agenda, Lapsui and Lehmuskallio’s black-and-white feature exhibits a striking new perspective on their impact—that is, one that’s refreshingly free of both nationalist and globalist attitudes.

Another film with an otherworldly aesthetic is Deborah Stratman’s fascinating Last Things, an imaginative visual essay that bypasses history and mankind almost entirely, focusing on the initial formation of the Earth and its place in the galaxy, as well as speculating on potential future developments. Inspired by the work of authors and post-human theorists including Clarice Lispector, J.-H. Rosny Aîné, and Donna Harraway, Stratman explores the latent storytelling power of information that can be gleaned from the chemical structures and electro-magnetic fields of minerals, rock formations, and constellations of stars.

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Supported by a richly textured sound design, Last Things’s deployment of microscopic close-ups and elaborate technical visualizations allows for some truly mesmerizing imagery, while montage is also used to find surprising rhymes between wildly disparate physical forms. Niche scientific concepts are explained in an engaging way and close attention is paid to the specifics of geological and astronomical study, which gives extra authority to a kaleidoscopic, free-associative piece that successfully casts the inorganic in a strange, seductive new light.

The 18th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival
A scene from Jon Moritsugu’s Terminal USA.

An entirely different kind of defamiliarization is at work in writer-director Jon Moritsugu’s transgressive satire Terminal USA. An hour of sustained chaos, the film caused controversy when it was initially broadcast in 1993 by PBS, which had also coughed up for a significant proportion of its budget. Poking fun at the frustrated sexuality, mindless consumerism, repressed racial trauma, and homicidal rage of a Japanese-American family struggling to conform to the ideal of the perfectly assimilated model minority, it combines the best elements of Gregg Araki and John Waters into a Grand Guignol tableau of suburban dysfunction.

The film’s tone veers from gross-out humor to campy melodrama to self-aware deadpan, and its disreputable Gen X absurdism feels especially subversive today, what with clickbait sermonizing or artisanal prestige now apparently being the only acceptable ways of dealing with sensitive socio-political issues. Though its gleeful depiction of sexual exploitation, substance abuse, and white supremacist violence might appear outwardly nihilistic, the open disdain that Terminal USA has for character development or psychological realism also seems like an effective way to reckon with the popular social justice notion that representation is always a trap.

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The festival closed with the U.K. premiere of writer-director Sorayos Prapapan’s debut feature, Arnold Is a Model Student. Set primarily in and around a Bangkok high school, it follows the emergence of Thailand’s Bad Student movement in 2020, alongside the emotional development of the titular student (Korndanai Marc Dautzenberg).

Though he regularly flouts rules of conduct in class, Arnold’s academic abilities see him enlisted by the headmaster (Virot Ali), as a kind of ambassador for the school, a role that he reluctantly plays along with. He’s soon recruited by a man named Mr. Bee (Winyu Wongsurawat) for a less legitimate but more lucrative position, helping students to cheat on the national military academy entrance exam, as part of a bribery racket that apparently dates back several generations. The conflicts between his rebellious streak and his close proximity to authority are also complicated by his desire to avoid the fate of his deported Filipino dissident father.

Starting out as a wryly amusing portrait of institutional hypocrisy, the film gradually becomes more confrontational in its attitude toward Thailand’s pervasive corruption and oppressive patriotism. As small-scale protests against one teacher’s overzealous use of corporal punishment escalate to school-wide walkouts and demands for major educational reform, smartphone footage of the real-life Bad Student demonstrations and their violent suppression by police is used by Prapapan to drive home the gravity of the situation, illustrating the fundamental disconnect between the country’s sanitized propaganda and its problematic reality.

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Meanwhile, Arnold is increasingly overwhelmed by the upheavals of graduating from high school and the compromises of adulthood in Thailand, coming to realize that his success and self-actualization might come at the expense of a sense of belonging. With a carefully modulated tone and well-observed depictions of the quotidian rhythms of school life, this deceptively simple coming-of-age tale’s slow-burn storytelling builds to a quietly devastating finale.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival runs from March 3—5.

David Robb

David Robb is originally from the north of England. A fiction writer, he recently moved back to London after living in Montreal for three years.

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