THE mastermind behind Liverpool's visual arts centre has accepted a new challenge. Mike Chapple reports.
 ONCE upon a time Liverpool cinemagoers had to look elsewhere to fulfil their tastes for foreign pleasures. When Manchester's Cornerhouse was the nearest venue to see the classic works by acclaimed film directors from abroad. There was always the more cramped than cosy ambience of the Bluecoat's Film Institute. There was also the city's brief affair with the sticky-carpeted 051cinema, often more memorable for the encounters on the spattered stone steps on the approach outside, littered with used junkie paraphernalia and Mount Pleasant's more unpleasant denizens. Memories stretch back to the early 1990s and a resigned comment by one critic, who sighed after a press screening at the aforementioned venue just before it closed its doors for good: "Liverpool just couldn't sustain an art house cinema, there isn't the market for it." Unknown to him, however, there was a local man who thought differently. Eddie Berg not only believed that the city could have its own specialised cinema complex but harness the ideas of artists working in film, video and new media under the same roof. Last year Berg's pipedream - which began in the back room of the Unity Theatre in 1988 - was finally realised with the opening of the £11m Foundation of Art and Creative Technologies or FACT for short. Situated at the heart of the city centre's cultural redevelopment in Wood Street its success in commissioning promoting and developing new art forms as well as being a state of the art cinema development has been a revelation. So much so that Berg has been headhunted to become artistic director of the proposed National Centre for Moving Image. A successor to the British Film Institute, it will have access, among other things, to the 470,000 titles accumulated over the last 110 years. No wonder film buff Eddie, from Aigburth, is looking like the proverbial kid in the sweet shop as we sit talking in the bright and airy downstairs coffee lounge, the stone, glass and metal beauty of FACT soaring up above us. "The reason why I'm taking this job," he says enthusiastically in his soft Liverpudlian accent. "is not because I want to leave FACT because I absolutely love it and what I have achieved here. And it's not because I want to leave Liverpool just at this moment. But there's an opportunity to do another project that has the kind of ambition that I really would have liked for FACT and I really want to see if I can do something's that equally fantastic, in a different context. And, in some ways, I can do a lot more for Liverpool and FACT outside of Liverpool." | 
