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PROGRAMME ANNOUNCEMENT: ALCHEMY FILM AND MOVING IMAGE 2023

Jump cut, spring forward: you are invited to Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, 27 – 30 April 2023 

The thirteenth edition of Scotland’s festival of experimental film returns to Hawick, the Scottish Borders home of Alchemy Film & Arts, for an international programme of cinema screenings, moving-image exhibitions, live performances—and a Festival Ceilidh!  

Join us across four days for what’s been called ‘a festival unlike any other in Scotland’: a go-to gathering just 90 minutes from Edinburgh and Newcastle and two hours from Glasgow, delivered with that renowned and irreproducible Alchemy brand of warmth, charm and humour. Whether you’re visiting for a day, staying overnight or just passing through, this is something you’ll want to catch. 

The line-up of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2023 includes the world premiere of a new commission by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona; a suite of new films by Alchemy artist in residence Julia Parks; and live performances from Maxime Jean-Baptiste and Alchemy residents Jules Horne and Miwa Nagato-Apthorp.  

Our cinema screenings include new work by Oreet Ashery, Irineu Destourelles and current Margaret Tait Award nominees Rhona Mühlebach and George Finlay Ramsay; a focus on artist Jessie Growden; and a screening-performance dedicated to the relationship between Scotland and Puerto Rico. 

This year’s installations include new work from Maybelle Peters and Markeith Jamar Chavous and several films produced as part of Film Town, Alchemy’s award-winning community filmmaking and creative learning programme. A celebration of moving-image work made across Creative Scotland’s Culture Collective is threaded throughout this year’s programme.  

Browse the full festival schedule!

PERFORMANCES

OPENING EVENT
REBEL CELLO

Alchemy artist in residence Jules Horne opens our thirteenth edition with an assemblage of tall tales, an expanded cinema journey through film and literary archives of Scottish Borders gothic, feminist correctives, the relationship between ‘Ay Been’ and Heinz Beans, geological tremors along the Scottish-English border, and more – told with foot-tapping, cello-strumming, pedal-looping wonder.

WORLD PREMIERE
TO YIELD

Maxime Jean-Baptiste presents a new performance in darkness. Not just any darkness, but that of the cinema, when the lights go out just before the film begins, when the projection screen doesn’t yet exist, when bodies are audible but not visible, when voices start to speak, shout, from the outside: tired, in pain, this violence accumulated for centuries. When we yield to the darkness.

NEW MUSIC
MIWA NAGATO-APTHORP

Alchemy’s recent musician in residence Miwa Nagato-Apthorp performs new commissions responding to Scottish Borders history, including a speculative song about bondagers – women engaged by tenant farmers to do agricultural labour for landowners in the nineteenth century the hawthorn bush from which Hawick reportedly took its name. Followed by our Festival Ceilidh.

SCREENINGS

FOCUS
JULIA PARKS

The world premiere of four new films made by Alchemy artist in residence Julia Parks investigating the histories of people, plants, industry and textiles along the Teviot and Tweed Rivers.

FOCUS
JESSIE GROWDEN

Artist filmmaker and Alchemy favourite Jessie Growden returns for a retrospective of work, including new films, exploring forests, bodies, and selfhood through song, structure, portraiture and play.

FILM WITH LIVE READING
CALLIGRAPHIC LANDSCAPES: LETTERS ACROSS WIND AND WATER

An exploration of the continuities and discontinuities of Scotland and Puerto Rico as a conversation between the Global North and South – including films by Emilia Beatriz and Sofía Gallisá Muriente – guest-curated by Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs.

SHORTS
CERTAIN AND TRUE IT IS

A double bill homing in on the complex ways in which fact and myth are bound together.

  • Selfish Road (Oreet Ashery)
  • Family Fugue (George Finlay Ramsay)

SHORTS
EXCEPT FOR CARESSES

Seven films burn, fizz and contort with gestures of connection and desire.

  • Nazarbazi (Maryam Tafakory)
  • forms with space and distance and hills (Jason Moyes)
  • Hailstone (Claudia Claremi)
  • descending notes (Lou Lou Sainsbury)
  • Embers from yesterday, Aflame. (William Hong-xiao Wei)
  • asymmetrical future (Bryam Kinkela)
  • My Love Poem (Daru Mcaleece, John Hood)

SHORTS
IN THE LIFESPAN OF STARS

As one world ends and another begins, seven films interrogate the meaning of extinction, survival and community.

  • The Beginning and End of Everything (Viveka Frost)
  • Between the Blur (Greg Marshall)
  • steinrunnin (petrified) (Chris Paul Daniels, Anton Kaldal Ágústsson)
  • The Trace of the Box – Technicalized Good People (Moojin Brothers)
  • This place is a message (Webb-Ellis)
  • Juice (Mona Keil)
  • By Leaves We Live (Bash Khan)

SHORTS
MUSIC ON A FARM WAS A RARE THING

Seven films probe the constructs of image-making in relation to ownership, authorship, framing and power.

  • A Letter to Time (Seb Lord, Katie Somers, River Uhing, Lydia Beilby)
  • I’LL BE BACK! (Hope Strickland)
  • Silhouettes Remain (Maya Jeffereis)
  • MAN MADE (Elian Mikkola)
  • Hello, Whale (Laura Ohio)
  • maud. (Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Tomiwa Folorunso, Xavier LaCroix, Chizu Anucha)
  • Waiting for the Buff to Rub Me Out (Mark Lyken, Allana James)

SHORTS
STATUES SING SILENCE

Eight films reflect on the architectures, uncertainties and possibilities of labour in its extractive, everyday and speculative forms.

  • The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (Eva Giolo)
  • Bellsmyre Caledonia (Jack Guariento)
  • Through a Shimmering Prism, We Made a Way (Rhea Storr)
  • Proximity Study (Sight Lines) (Elizabeth M. Webb)
  • Train Song (Yanbin Zhao)
  • May You Live in Interesting Times (Martyna Ratnik)
  • FACE HOME VIEW (Raquel Vermunt)
  • What Could Happen Here (Hope London, Daniel Hughes)

SHORTS
TAKE ARMS AGAINST A SEA

From ocean to moon, six films wrestle with nothing less than life, death and birth and self-expression.

  • Sighscape (Duncan Cowles)
  • Incantation (Kalpana Subramanian)
  • Hankyō (Emma Dove)
  • I’m finally using my body for what I feel it is made to do (Owain Train McGilvary)
  • Camlet (Lewis Teckkam)
  • A Thousand Sighs (Lana Z Caplan)

SHORTS
THEREAFTER, FOREVER, ONCE UPON

A double bill presents untold prehistories and redefines the storytelling potentials of Scottish towns and forests.

  • Monsters Walk in Ten Chapters (Irineu Destourelles)
  • Excitement Is Not Part of My Feeling Repertoire (Rhona Mühlebach)

SHORTS
UP, DOWN AND SIDE TO SIDE

Exploring the bricks and mortar of encounter, eight films unlock new memories, sensory environments and modes of being.

  • Gardez L’Eau (Enam Gbewonyo, Freddie Leyden)
  • Barbed Song (Abril Iberico Mevius)
  • The Light Show (Samantha Dick)
  • Walking to Connect (Elina Bry)
  • Sight Leak (Zuqiang Peng)
  • Gold or Mist or Memory (Mariella Driskell, Percy Walker-Smith)
  • Sunspots (Yannick Mosimann)
  • Moune Ô (Maxime Jean-Baptiste)

SHORTS
WELCOME TO THE DAILY CALM

Ten films negotiate and navigate life’s cluttered desktops, its crowded frames, and the quiet chaos of its everyday routines.

  • To Do (Saul Pankhurst)
  • Expired (Yoni Bentovim)
  • L’arbre (Chantal Partamian)
  • Jill, Uncredited (Anthony Ing)
  • robyn (Autojektor)
  • “Who Should I be in the World?” (Jamal Ademola)
  • The Distance Exists Between (Haneen Hadiy)
  • Bigger on the Inside (Angelo Madsen Minax)
  • rough cut botanical (Wendy Kirkup)
  • Before Iftar (Julie Halazy)

EXHIBITIONS

BELONGING
Hadrian Creatives, Khadea Santi, Alchemy Film & Arts

CITY OF HOMES
Marta Adamowicz, Robert Motyka

CONSERVING MATTER
Maybelle Peters

CULTIVATE!
Alchemy Film Town participants, Julia Parks

RISKY BODIES
Emily Beaney, Cherrie Beaney

THE WAVES AND THE MANTRAM, PART 1
Markeith Jamar Chavous

WHAT IS HELD (BETWEEN WATERS)
Natasha Thembiso Ruwona

WHAT LIES IN FRONT OF US
Moving Images Caravan

  • The Entangled Forest (Nick Jordan)
  • Conversations with Ogham (Moving Image Makers Collective)
  • Endling (Caroline Vitzhum)

7 x 7
Hawick Primary Schools, Alchemy Film & Arts

VOLUNTEER WITH US

We are currently seeking volunteers to support the delivery of this year’s festival. Taking pride in the hospitality, solidarity and inclusivity for which our flagship event is known, we offer a range of volunteering opportunities – from ushering and invigilation to tech and front-of-house support.

Please see our Volunteer page for more information about the roles and how to register your interest in volunteering.

Banner image: Tell Me About the Burryman, Julia Parks, 2023