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Back in April 2020, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival realised that they couldnât proceed with their typically convivial in-person event in the town of Hawick in the Scottish borders, the organisers decided to pivot at short notice to a free global streaming edition.
Of course, they werenât the only ones then to assume the switch would be a one-off â but one year later and their second online festival took place across the May Day bank holiday weekend (29 Aprilâ3 May). And so it was that the programmes took the opportunity to reflect on the past year â for many, one defined by a sense of stasis â by curating a programme that in various ways engaged with notions of repetition, cycles, loops, constraints and catastr