Download the 2011 Festival Programme.
A magical weekend inspired by the four elements – Fire, Earth, Air and Water, packed with screenings, art installations around the town and special events.
Now in our second year, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival is fast becoming a real cultural highlight for the Scottish Borders
Continue ReadingThere is something fundamental and deeply affecting at the heart of mankind’s relationship to the elements. What might happen in our moments of physical and psychological encounter? Three high-class housewives escape to an Icelandic snow cap, we take a walk along the paved earth of New Kent road, meditating upon the enshrouding and enshrouded earth
Continue ReadingWe’re screening over 40 short artists films during the festival. Organised into three hour-long programmes in the Tower Mill auditorium – Elementals: Presence, Elementals: Landscape of Forms and Elementals: Serious Light, plus a series of special screenings in our Improbable Cinema space.
Continue ReadingThe Improbable Cinema is our special screening space, open for the whole three days of the festival (10am to 6pm, Fri, Sat and Sun) to show an eclectic range of short and feature length films. While there will be set times for specific screenings advertised, the Improbable Cinema is a more informal screening environment – you are free to come and go, dip in and out, as you please.
Continue ReadingThis year we are excited to be presenting a number of artists’ installations in other venues, empty shops and disused buildings around the town of Hawick. There will be impromptu screenings in strange places, including our own mini-cinema and a horse trailer! The trailer will be parked right outside Heart of Hawick, containing a show specially curated by artist Pat Law.
Continue ReadingAn exciting mix of features, from the very new to the quite old. We are very pleased to be presenting Burning Ice (2010), a new documentary feature covering a voyage off the coast of Greenland, introduced by the film’s producer, David Buckland from Cape Farewell. We also have a special preview screening of Louise Milne’s Druids (2011), alongside classic ‘elemental’ films including
Continue ReadingThe elements are as much psychological as physical, embodied both in the natural landscapes of the world we inhabit and as substantial forces within image-making. This programme explores elemental embodiment as a set of both extensive and intensive qualities, in image substance itself and landscape as subject. There are abstract expressions, evocations of the elemental transitions of place
Continue Reading
The Improbable Cinema is our special screening space, open for the whole three days of the festival (10am to 6pm, Fri, Sat and Sun) to show an eclectic range of short and feature length films. While there will be set times for specific screenings advertised, the Improbable Cinema is a more informal screening environment – you are free to come and go, dip in and out, as you please.
Continue Reading
Experimental film is an organic, alchemical substance in itself. To make a film you need light, energy, salts and minerals, running water, darkness, acid, heat and wind. The films in this programme express their own materiality. They are cries in the dark, trying to connect their ethereal content with the raw rocky substance of which they are born.
Continue Reading
The elements are as much psychological as physical, embodied both in the natural landscapes of the world we inhabit and as substantial forces within image-making. This programme explores elemental embodiment as a set of both extensive and intensive qualities, in image substance itself and landscape as subject. There are abstract expressions, evocations of the elemental transitions of place
Continue Reading
There is something fundamental and deeply affecting at the heart of mankind’s relationship to the elements. What might happen in our moments of physical and psychological encounter? Three high-class housewives escape to an Icelandic snow cap, we take a walk along the paved earth of New Kent road, meditating upon the enshrouding and enshrouded earth
Continue Reading
We’re screening over 40 short artists films during the festival. Organised into three hour-long programmes in the Tower Mill auditorium – Elementals: Presence, Elementals: Landscape of Forms and Elementals: Serious Light, plus a series of special screenings in our Improbable Cinema space.
Continue Reading
This year we are excited to be presenting a number of artists’ installations in other venues, empty shops and disused buildings around the town of Hawick. There will be impromptu screenings in strange places, including our own mini-cinema and a horse trailer! The trailer will be parked right outside Heart of Hawick, containing a show specially curated by artist Pat Law.
Continue Reading
An exciting mix of features, from the very new to the quite old. We are very pleased to be presenting Burning Ice (2010), a new documentary feature covering a voyage off the coast of Greenland, introduced by the film’s producer, David Buckland from Cape Farewell. We also have a special preview screening of Louise Milne’s Druids (2011), alongside classic ‘elemental’ films including
Continue Reading
Download the 2011 Festival Programme.
A magical weekend inspired by the four elements – Fire, Earth, Air and Water, packed with screenings, art installations around the town and special events.
Now in our second year, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival is fast becoming a real cultural highlight for the Scottish Borders
Continue Reading
A classic of meditative cinema, Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? was seven years in the making, filmed with one camera and hand-edited by Bae Yong-Kyun. The film follows the lives of three generations of Buddhist monks living together on a hilltop in South Korea, centred on the life of Kibong, a young man who decides to leave his unsatisfying life of ennui in the city. The film traces the lives of the three monks in their daily rituals, penetrated with hauntingly beautiful images of water, fire, earth and air, visually elucidating the tenets of Buddhist thought while captivating us with its quiet pace and understated yet powerful drama.
Continue Reading
FILM – SPECIAL PREVIEW SCREENING
Edinburgh based Louise Milne’s new documentary takes us on a poetic journey through the magical darklands of deepest England. The film follows a group of modern Druids and their friends over the course of the ritual
year. Shot at Stanton Drew stone circle, and in the wild beauty of King Arthur’s West Country, The Druids explains the appeal of this nature faith, just recently recognised as an official religion in the UK. Milne explores the basic elements of Druidry, its history, major festivals, rituals, myths and legends, while evoking the Druids’ sense of spiritual connection to the land, giving us an understanding of what it is to be Druid in the 21st century.
Alchemy is a partnership project between Heart of Hawick, Borders Arts Trust and Creative Arts Business Network.
