A GROUND-breaking festival is to “stretch the boundaries” of Gaelic filmmaking.

Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival has this year commissioned two expanded cinema pieces featuring live music to celebrate the cultural impact of the language. For Experiments in Gaelic, artist MacGillivray will present Garadh Gaidhlig nam Marbh (The Gaelic Garden of the Dead), a cinematic alphabet of trees featuring cinematography by Anonymous Bosch and a live score performed by MacGillivray, Stafford Glover (Extreme Noise Terror) and Hardeep Deerhe.

There is also a new collaboration between Borders filmmaker Dorothy Alexander and experimental musician Nicoletta Stephanz which will explore the elemental constructs of Gaelic song and myth.

The festival will see the town of Hawick in the Scottish Borders host some of the world’s most respected and acclaimed moving image artists. Audiences have their pick of more than 130 film screenings, 36 world premieres, 12 film installations, expanded cinema performances, a filmmaker symposium and film walk.

Alchemy was recently awarded Regular Funding by Creative Scotland to deliver the next three editions of the festival, becoming the first Regularly Funded organisation in the Borders.

Richard Ashrowan, the festival’s creative director, said Alchemy had grown over its last eight years to be an annual focus for the national and international filmmaking community, while also becoming a “vital” player in the cultural and economic regeneration of the Scottish Borders.

“The great diversity in our programme this year reflects the astonishing breadth of work being made today, much of which might never be seen outside the context of festivals like ours,” he said.

“We’ll be hosting the work of one of the true masters of surrealist film, while presenting urgent and vital new voices exploring political activism, the dystopian invasion of virtuality, feminism and female artists, poetry-film, Chinese artists, and Gaelic language film and performance. This year’s festival aims to show us why creative action matters, and why it is so important for all of us to be part of it.”

This year, the festival pays a special tribute to the work of legendary Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, a pioneer of surrealist cinema who has influenced Terry Gilliam, Guillermo Del Toro and David Lynch. Alchemy will honour his lifelong achievements with the UK premiere of Insect, the film Svankmajer says will be his last, along with a programme of his early short films and panel discussions with the UK’s leading experts on his work.