Now in its fifteenth year, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival once again welcomes visual artists and fans alike to Hawick on 1-4 May with a multidisciplinary programme exploring identity, belonging, and extraction. 

Alchemy has long prided itself on being an experimental and collaborative space that brings together the local, national, and international in order to stimulate critically-engaged conversations about the world and art’s place within it. This year is no exception: featuring more than 60 films (both shorts and feature-length) alongside exhibitions and live performances, this edition offers a plethora of rich visual manifestations of, and meditations on, ideas of community, displacement, and diaspora, and how they are so often rooted in the legacy of colonialism. 

These questions resonate particularly with one country at the centre of this year’s programme. Thanks to the contributions of Alchemy’s current Researcher in Residence Francisco Llinás, Alchemy’s team have curated a number of events that centre around Venezuela and how its recent past and present relate to the festival’s overarching themes. As Venezuela and its diaspora reconcile with the country’s current migration crisis – the second largest in the world, with roughly 8 million people having already been displaced – Llinás’s programme sheds light on the long history of extraction and exploitation in Venezuela, actively seeking to avoid “sensationalising the displacement [of Venezuelans] as a sudden phenomenon without context – historical or otherwise.”

There are various events centring on Venezuela’s past and present, both within its archives and the diaspora. Friday’s programme features the cinematic work of Venezuelan artist and filmmaker Adriana Vila Guevara. Across six shorts, Vila Guevara meditates on themes of identity, (im)permanence, and loss through an engagement with other art forms including sculpture and literature. On Sunday, Excerpts on Extraction will see the work of artists Esperanza Mayobre, Andrés Prypchan, and Carlos Oteyza put in dialogue with one another. This multidisciplinary event – featuring a live performance by Mayobre titled Immigration Services, Prypchan’s restoration of previously unseen footage from Venezuelan director Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 film Araya, and Oteyza’s documentary Mayami nuestro (presented for the first time with English subtitles) – will explore the remnants of colonialism in Venezuela and its ties to the country’s multilayered crises. To mark the anniversary of Benacerraf’s passing, the festival will close with a screening of Araya.

Complementing this focus on diaspora and displacement are seven shorts programmes across the four days, featuring both national and international artists. On Saturday, Did Such A World Ever Exist sees nine films examine different sites where “public and private realms are formed and contested.” The relationship between space and memory is also considered in Places We Knew, where seven shorts will look at ancestry, heritage, and colonial legacies. 

The feature films included in this year’s programme are equally engaged in these pertinent themes. Through compiled archival footage, Kamal Aljafari’s award-winning A Fidai Film confronts head-on the systemic violence that continues to colonise and contest Palestinians’ identity. The lingering impact of colonial violence in French Guiana is explored in the premiere of Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Kouté Vwa, a hybrid documentary following the nation’s younger generation. 

Although this year’s programme frequently looks beyond the borders of Scotland, this does not mean that Alchemy has strayed from its local roots. Rather, this year’s edition opens with a (now sold-out) preview of Rum an Milk, a feature-length documentary observing the centuries-old ‘common riding’ tradition that takes place in Hawick every year. As explained by the festival’s director and head curator, Michael Pattison, the film captures a centuries-old tradition that marks the boundaries of the Borders town and preserves its rich heritage in a way that “resists easy explanation.” On Saturday, Alchemy Artists in Residence Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn will present On Weaving, a film exploring the legacy of textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein and their home, High Sutherland, in the Scottish Borders. Scotland also features prominently in this year’s exhibition programme, where nine moving-image artists are showcasing both individual and community projects that explore further themes including war, climate collapse, and neurodiversity.

For those local to the area or willing to risk catching the final bus/train home, most days, allowing for artists and attendees to come together in conversation. Friday night will include the launch of Musician in Residence Miwa Nagato-Apthorp’s debut EP, followed by a ceilidh.

Four days does not feel like enough time to be able to enjoy all the wonders on offer at this year’s festival, so make sure to make the most of it. For further details about each of the screenings, exhibitions, and events on offer, go to the festival’s webpage. See you there next week!