Voices From Here: Amber Film Retrospective brings together six decades of Amber Films as part of Durham Folk Festival, looking at the North East through the people who live, work and make their lives here.

From shipyards and fishing communities to markets, music, family life and changing industries, Amber’s films have been shaped by long relationships with people and place. Dialect, humour, argument and local knowledge are not treated as background detail, but as part of how these stories are told.

Alongside a small info display, rolling drop-in screenings bring together films made between 1969 and 2017. Across documentary, drama and work made with archive material, they show a region speaking in its own voices, rather than being explained from somewhere else.

Rolling Screenings Throughout the Day - Films Include:

Maybe, 1969

One of Amber’s earliest films in the North East, made around the Shields Ferry and featuring Tyneside traditional singer Louis Killen. When BBC North East offered to broadcast the film on the condition that its dialect song was removed, Amber refused. The film stayed off television and the song stayed in.

Wallsend ’72, 1972

Following Swan Hunter’s Brass Band and the Rising Sun Legionnaires juvenile jazz band towards a performance at Wallsend Festival, the film connects music and leisure with the working and family life surrounding the shipyards.

Launch, 1974

The construction and launch of the World Unicorn oil tanker at Wallsend, seen not only through the enormous scale of the ship but through the workers who built it and the crowds gathered along the river to watch it enter the Tyne.

Six to Midnight, 1974

A day in Newcastle, centred around the Grainger Market and the traders, shoppers and passers-by moving through the city. Commissioned by Newcastle City Council as a promotional film, Amber’s observational portrait proved rather less promotional than expected. The council rejected it and Amber declined to recut it.

The Filleting Machine, 1981

Amber’s first feature drama, adapted from the play by North Shields writer Tom Hadaway. Set within a family on the Ridges Estate, the film explores changing expectations, insecure work and tensions between generations against the wider life of the North Shields fishing community.

Bamboozler, 2007

A portrait of Tyneside percussionist Bruce Arthur and the extraordinary collection of drums, gongs, sound sculptures and instruments passed to his friend and former pupil Brendan Murphy. Through the objects and the people around them, the film follows a creative life continuing after Arthur’s death.

The Art of Shipbuilding, 2017

More than forty years after “Launch”, Amber returns to shipbuilding and the people who worked in the yards. Combining film, photography, poetry and painting, the work brings together Jack Davitt and Peter Burns, both former shipyard workers, to explore work, skill, memory and a changed industrial landscape.

About Durham Folk Festival

Durham Folk Festival is the new home of the team behind Hartlepool Folk Festival, which was founded in 2015 and ran in the town for ten years. Following the closure of Hartlepool Borough Hall in 2025, the festival relocated to Durham, bringing the same organisation, team and volunteer community to a new city.

Running from 18 to 20 September, the festival brings together live music, singing sessions, workshops, talks, screenings, ceilidhs, commissions and special events across Durham. Redhills Durham Miners Hall is the main festival hub, with events also taking place at venues including Durham Cathedral, the Gala Theatre and Durham Town Hall.