2025 Festival Schedule
A special preview of a new feature portrait of Hawick Common Riding and the town-wide labours that make it happen.
Join us for a wee nightcap in the Heart of Hawick café bar. Free entry with any festival cinema ticket.
Kamal Aljafari’s award-winning feature, powerfully reclaims archive images of Palestinian life, plundered from the Palestinian Research Centre during Israel’s invasion of Beirut in 1982.
Diaries and dispatches unfold in dialogue, as four films map identity through quotation, questioning and correspondence.
In the cinema of Venezuelan artist filmmaker Adriana Vila Guevara, notions of identity, knowledge and loss are abundant with poetry and light.
Join us for the special launch of Noren, the debut EP by Alchemy musician in residence Miwa Nagato-Apthorp.
Six films ruminate on the relationship between bodies and borders, consent and control, desire and power.
Screening
Feature
Kouté Vwa
Maxime Jean-Baptiste
Saturday 3 May
19:30 – 21:15 / 76′ + Q&A
Heart of Hawick
A hybrid documentary vividly exploring community and youth amidst the prolonged fallout of colonial violence in French Guiana.
Screening
Feature
On Weaving
Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn
Saturday 3 May
17:00 – 18:00 / 26′ + Q&A
Heart of Hawick
Artists in residence Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn respond to the legacies of textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein and their modernist Scottish Borders home.
Screening
Shorts
Did Such A World Ever Exist
Saturday 3 May
14:30 – 16:00 / 65′ + Q&A
Heart of Hawick
Nine films examine work and the city as sites upon which public and private realms are formed and contested.
Seven films ponder erasure and reanimation, community and memory, and loss as its own form of presence.
Six films span and stretch across ancestral lineages, linguistic legacies, dreamworlds in deep time.
Weaving a mythical tale of salt with a narrative history of human extractive activity in Araya, the film highlights the continuities between the region’s colonial history and neocolonial present.
Four films articulate a vision of cinema as connector, mediator, a tool for conversation and reflection.
Screening
Shorts
Excerpts On Extraction
Francisco Llinas
Sunday 4 May
14:30 – 16:00 / 90′ including Q&A
Heart of Hawick
A special performance, screening and discussion event exploring archives of displacement within the Venezuelan diaspora
Seven films interrogate the meaning of thresholds, constellations, collaborations and portals.
Test your nerves and knowledge of movies and music of all types, across themed and not-too-obscure rounds.
by Michael Pattison Maybelle Peters began a residency with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2024. The project set out to explore the artist’s mother’s maiden name, Scotland, and to respond to
Exhibition
To Make (Our) Work Song
Natsumi Sakamoto’
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10.00-17.00
Borders Textile Towerhouse
by Michael Pattison Inspired by the Scottish Gaelic ‘Waulking Song’, Natsumi Sakamoto’s To Make (Our) Work Song explores the intimate relationship between labour, gender and song, and the possibility of
Exhibition
A River Holds a Perfect Memory
Hope Strickland
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10:00 – 17:00
Heritage Hub
by Michael Pattison Hope Strickland returns to Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival with a simultaneously tender and radical film that teases out diasporic connections across apparently disparate geographies. Knowingly
Exhibition
Out of Office
Film Club
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10:00 – 17:00
Heart of Hawick Floor 2 Lobby
by Tom Swift Set in the not-too-distant future, Out of Office is a new reimagining of late capitalism and its self-cannibalising instincts amidst climate collapse, co-designed by attendees of Film
by Michael Pattison Landscape Landscape observes and responds to a series of fallen trees over the course of 13 months in the aftermath of Storm Arwen, the weather event that
Exhibition
How Much Air Lungs Can Hold
Isabel Barfod
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY 10:00 – 17:00
Borders Textile Towerhouse
by Michael Pattison Isabel Barfod’s How Much Air Lungs Can Hold is an affecting and immersive work exploring the relationships between Blackness and swimming. Compiling audio testimony from eleven conversations with
Exhibition
The Diary of a Sky
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10:00 – 17:00
Unit 4
by Michael Pattison In The Diary of a Sky, Turner Prize winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan accrues a data-driven portrait of sustained belligerence, by the Israeli Air Force, in the airspace
Exhibition
Arcade Machine
Alchemy Film & Arts, Borders Additional Needs Group
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10:00 – 17:00
Heart of Hawick Floor 1
by Zuzana Fryntová We are delighted to launch a new interactive videogame co-designed by Alchemy Film & Arts and Borders Additional Needs Group (BANG) exploring participants’ lived experience of neurodiversity.
Exhibition
The Day as a Perpetual Morning
Mónica Baptista
Thursday 1 May — Sunday 4 May 10:00 – 17:00
Heart of Hawick Room 205
by Michael Pattison Mónica Baptista’s latest analogue work, made during a residency at Porto Botanical Garden, explores materiality, rhythm and time. The Day as a Perpetual Morning pairs the separate