[4] Among its access policies, Alchemy lists that all films barring 16mm presentations are captioned; all programmes are provided with content warnings; tickets to cinema screenings are priced at a sliding scale.
The festival states on its FilmFreeway page that it is proudly non-competitive and that it "believes premiere policies – whereby a film is disqualified from screening at one event because it was exhibited by another – actively produce competition, disparity and territorialism between artists, communities and curators.
Situating the festival in the rural Scottish Borders town of Hawick, he described its foundation as "a provocation to prevailing urban-centrism in terms of culture", an attempt to create "a quality of friendliness and intimacy, an environment in which filmmakers, audiences and volunteers all mix, generating a real outpouring of creativity and conversation".
[9][10][11] The first eight editions of Alchemy featured premiere screenings by influential artists and experimental filmmakers, including Jan Švankmajer, Sarah Pucill, Andrew Kötting, Rachel Maclean, The Quay Brothers, Semiconductor (artists), Mike Hoolboom, Nina Danino, Patrick Bokanowski, Jacques Perconte, Mark Leckey and Ben Rivers.
The eleventh edition featured keynote lectures from Marxist intellectual Vijay Prashad, a live performance on the Scottish Black Atlantic by Natasha Ruwona, an artist talk and screening from Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa about her 2018 film Promised Lands and two guest-curated shorts programmes - one by Greg de Cuir Jr on the intersection of race and ecology and another by New Programmers, a group of young people from the Scottish Borders mentored by Alchemy, on care, healing and mutualism.
In addition, six newly commissioned artworks encompassing image, text and sound, were presented by artists Ania Bas, Jamie Crewe, Harry Josephine Giles, Jade Montserrat, Cinzia Mutigli and Kaiya Waerea.
[citation needed] The programme included a keynote from Alchemy artist in resident Jade Montserrat, who also presented Ritual Passage: Memorials for Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jenkins, her new commission, at Heritage Hub.
Elsewhere in the programme, Alchemy artist in residence Mark Lyken presents the world premiere of Notes from a Low Orbit, a new feature film made about Hawick, its communities and their rituals.
From October 2020 to April 2021, Alchemy delivered Continue Watching, an online season of film screenings, discussion events and critical writing, featuring work by Yashaswini Raghunandan, Noorafshan Mirza and Brad Butler, Joshua Bonnetta, Clemens Wilhelm and Jan Martinec, and two guest-curated programmes - by Marcus Jack, of artists' moving image in Scotland from 1970 to 2020, and Jonathan Ali, of experimental horror films from the Caribbean.