Amber Online

Amber is a film & photography collective based in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England. Amber Films, Side Gallery, Cinema and Café are all part of it. This website brings together a full sense of the activity, history and collections for the first time...

Current Activity and Amber Films are self-explanatory - both come with clips. The Side Photographic Collection is in Photography. Check out what's on at Side Gallery and Side Cinema and what you can eat at Side Café. Find out about Amber History - we're 40 next May; buy our films, books, prints & posters at the Online Shop; register if you want comment on any of the work. Join the Amber Forum (you need to register separately for this) and keep in contact by signing up for our RSS feeds.

Looking for a Side Cinema Trainee

12 months @ two and a half days per week, fee: £6,000

Amber is looking for an energetic, imaginative and self-motivated individual who will take full advantage of this traineeship in cinema programming, audience development and administration. Applicants must be interested in working creatively in the context provided by Amber and its 48 seat screening venue, which has built a reputation around independent, socially engaged cinema. The traineeship is supported by Northern Film & Media. More

Beachlife DVDs from Amber

Hot off the press we have two new DVDs exploring wildly different beach cultures in the North of England. Seacoal was Amber's first feature drama, made with the traveller community gathering coal from the sea at Lynemouth, Northumberland - it won the European Film Award in 1985.

The Writing in the Sand, constructs a working class day out on the beach almost entirely from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen's beautiful black and white photographs. A snip at £15 each, they can be bought via the Amber Online Shop or from Side Gallery.

Current Exhibitions at Side Gallery

THE ROMA JOURNEYS

Joakim Eskildsen

Saturday 19 April to Saturday 14 June

Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 5pm, Free.

This people has an estimated 20 million members... There are reasons for this imprecision... Experience has taught them of the injuries they and their families can be subjected to once they have been identified – which means registered. Only some rudiments of their language, Romani, have been recorded in written form. And there are reasons for this reticence too: a purely oral mother-tongue tradition has greater chances of survival in a consistently hostile environment. What cannot be recorded in writing evades its persecutors more easily. Günter Grass

Between 2000 and 2006 Joakim Eskildsen travelled in seven different countries photographing the life of the Roma and the conditions they face. The journeys, in India, Romania, Russia, Hungary, Greece, Finland and France, came about as a result of chance, coincidence and personal contact, rather than any process of meticulous planning. What the journeys open up on is somewhere and something beyond nations. As Grass writes in the foreword to Eskildsen’s and writer Cia Rinne’s book The Roma Journeys:

They are, from their centuries of experience, in a position to teach us how to cross borders, indeed, to abolish the borders in and around us and to create the kind of Europe without borders that is not only the subject of empty oratory but an actual state of affairs.

Now Showing at the Side Cinema

Thursday 10 April sees a screening of Les Blank's Chulas Fronteras from 1976, a look at TexMex music and culture featuring Flaco Jimenez and Lydia Mendoza. We then have a short season of films linked to Joakim Eskildsen's The Roma Journeys at Side Gallery - Tony Gatlif's Exiles (Thu 17 April), John Jeremy's Django Legacy (Thu 24 April), Swingbridge Video's Roma: The Untold Holocaust and From Brno... To Benwell (Thu 1 May) and Dumitru Budrala's The Curse of the Hedgehog (Thu 8 May).

For more on the American Music Season, more on the Roma Season and more on the up-coming Amber at 40 Season click as approriate.

Murray Martin, 1943 - 2007

It's with huge sadness that we announce the death of Murray Martin, founder member and key figure in the development and achievements of Amber. He had an instinct in recognising particular qualities in the individuals he gathered around him, some of whom became part of the collective, many of whom associated themselves in the work. To get an idea of his legacy, explore the many different sections and pages on this website. There is very little he didn't contribute to in some way. Most of it grew out of the vision he had and inspired in others. After a period of illness and brief hospitalisation, he had a cardiac arrest. For anyone wishing to contribute memories and testimonies, please visit the Amber Forum. An online exhibition of photographs from Murray's life can be seen in Murray Martin - The Album.