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Free Entry
The Burr of Berwick Film Library is a community video archive and exhibition series. Open and evolving, the Burr Film Library offers a shared space for screenings, discussions, and creativity.
Based at 22 Bridge Street, the Film Library is open Saturdays 12 – 4pm. The Library also travels to present pop-up events at spaces and occasions around town.
With the potential to speak to personal memories and experiences, the films reflect and respond to real-world topics. Everyone is invited to pop in for a cuppa and share ideas and stories, or delve into the Library’s themes through events and workshops.
Image credits for selected ephemera featured in the archive:
Bus Advertising – Draft designs • Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 1993
Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Edinburgh Lesbian Line Annual Report Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 1986 – 1987
Photograph of Bus Advert • Edinburgh Gay Switchboard and Lesbian Line • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • c. 1993
Speaking Out Project Zine 5 • Evan • Copyright Lothian Health Services Archive • Courtesy of University of Edinburgh • 2022
Queer Care Caravan
The Queer Care Caravan is an artist residency hosted by The Burr of Berwick, exploring resilient LGBTQIA+ community-led care across a Film Library exhibition, workshops and screenings.
Inspired by the use of caravans as a therapeutic retreat, 3 artists from Scotland, the Netherlands and Canada spend time in Berwick-upon-Tweed sharing radical approaches to care taken by the resilient LGBTQIA+ community.
The project explores how care and knowledge are shared – past and present – to support LGBTQIA+ people’s rights and wellbeing. The Film Library features a curated selection of video works and ephemera exploring queer care, including materials from Edinburgh Action for Trans Health and AIDS activism. Free monthly events offer the opportunity to make friends and share films, walks, conversations and meals.
The Queer Care Caravan workshops are facilitated by LGBTQIA+ artists Cannach MacBride, Conal McStravck, and Mikiki who have curated queer and trans care media and community care resources with cooperation from from Lothian Health Services Archive, Edinburgh, Tyne and Wear Archives and UK trans mutual aid groups and transnational LGBTQIA support groups, past and present.
Saturday 17 January 2026 • Community Care Workshop • Find out more
Saturday 21 February 2026 • Self Care Workshop • Find out more
Positive Men
Words and images from these scenes resonate throughout the documentary portraits which follow. The interviews, conducted in Toronto and San Francisco (1993-1994), feature artists, filmmakers, AIDS community workers, writers and volunteers who have made unique contributions within the cultural and community responses to AIDS. Included in this series of portraits are visual artists Andy Fabo and Stephen Andrews, video artist Zachery Longboy, performance poet Courtnay McFarlane, Beowulf Thorne – editor of Diseased Pariah Newsletter, safe sex author Richard Locke, and Dan Wolfieler – director of the San Francisco Stop AIDS Project.
Positive Men concludes with a moving portrait of the late filmmaker, Marlon Riggs.
Lloyd Wong, Unfinished
Lesley Loksi Chan’s poignant work of archival intimacy blends fragments of her research notes with the once-lost footage of Lloyd Wong—a man who filmed his life living with AIDS in the early 1990s, but died before fashioning it into a finished piece. Rough and unprocessed, her film beautifully explores the meaning of queer inheritance, of incompletion and the act of repeated looking.
Q-LoXXX
Developed through collaboration with queer Latinx asylum seekers and migrants connected to Papaya Kuir, this project blends Latin American decolonial and cannibalistic discourses with aspects of queer resistance practice and theory. Through role play, fabulation, writing and collage, participants collectively imagined Q-LoXXX—a speculative utopia shaped by queer ghosts—whilst handmade scenography and props gave form to a transformative space for world-making and documentation.