Outset Scotland supported the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival New Cinema Award in 2018.
Entering its 4th year, this Award is attracting increasing acclaim and interest, and for the first time it was presented in the Festival's main cinema.
In 2018, the prize was awarded to Callum Hill for her film Crowtrap. In announcing the award at the Festival's closing ceremony, the jury of Sky Hopinka, Sonali Joshi and Gail Pickering stated that:
'Crowtrap' by Callum Hill elegantly weaves together personal and national narratives, carrying us along a journey through a quiet fury of voice. Reflecting on the melancholy of bearing witness and remembering, it raises questions of where do we go now, and what does the idea of we even mean. The image and the voice are strands layered tightly yet float freely through deft cinematography and editing. There is something fresh, and familiar about this film.'
On receiving the Berwick New Cinema Award 2018, Hill commented:
'I am incredibly honoured to have premiered 'Crowtrap' at Berwick and to have won the New Cinema award is in all honesty beyond my comprehension. Words seem inadequate.
The making of 'Crowtrap' was not an easy pursuit, so much personal frustration fragmented into visual rumination I feared that it would not be understood when all along I was trying to create a work that would be emotionally universal. Winning this award has given me some humble confidence that perhaps I was able to create a work that resonates with society and the chaotic drift of our political and psychological selves.
A warm thank you to the jury, those who attended the festival and everyone behind the scenes that make Berwick such an intimate and special platform for artist and filmmakers.'
Callum Hill is a London based artist filmmaker. Her films are led by real characters, locations and experiences. From these factual starting points she constructs idiosyncratic, at times erratic, narratives that move between the personal and the political. Previous awards include The Berwick New Cinema Award (2018) and The Aesthetica Artist Film Award (2016). Last year she was participent of Film London’s FLAMIN Fellowship and was an artist in residence at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples. In 2019 she was artist in resident at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin where she was developing a new film work ‘A Portrait of an Artist as a Young German Bitch’. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and Moving Image at the Royal College of Art, London.
Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival (BFMAF) is one of the UK’s leading festivals for new cinema and artists’ moving image. Based in England’s most northerly town, BFMAF is a dynamic forum where fresh artistic voices develop and audiences hungry for complex and challenging art are nurtured. Increasingly recognised for its innovative programme and critical engagement, BFMAF presents artists’ and filmmakers’ work in the cinema as well as expanded formats of exhibition and performance.
