ICO news
- Applications for our next Developing Your Film Festival (DYFF) training course are open! The world’s only intensive training programme for film festival professionals, this course comes 100% recommended by all previous attendees. And that’s no small feat, as we’re talking about 222 participants from over 170 different film festivals! Apply now and you could be part of our fantastic DYFF alumni network.
- We’re excited to be heading to HOME Manchester on Thursday 2 May for our Young Audiences Screening Day with films such as Booksmart (pictured) in our programme – and even more excited to open registration for our Summer Screening Days very soon! Get ready to spend a lovely weekend in July at a seaside town, in Lewes’ beautiful Depot Cinema.
- New Towns, Our Town is a unique feature-length archive film programme that we’re proud to be able to make available to exhibitors across the UK from 17 May 2019. This new archive film sheds light on one of the most significant shared stories of British social history, the legacy and impact of the New Towns movement.
- The latest two programmes in our popular Britain on Film tour are also currently available for bookings with subsidised fees, starting from as little as £20. During a time of intense political turmoil, growing public activism and ongoing debates, Protest! and Welcome to Britain offer a chance to explore a century of protest and new arrivals to the UK via touching and fascinating footage from around the country.
- Programming is at the heart of what we do at the ICO. Want to find out more about how we can help your venue? Get in touch with our programming team today.
- What would summer be without attending a great outdoor screening? If you’d like to organise one yourself, our new downloadable guide is here to help you with that.
- Want to join team ICO? We’re currently looking for a Project Manager for our exciting new touring programme celebrating the 1980s UK Black Arts movement (deadline 26 April, 5pm), a Film Hub South East Development Officer (deadline 29 April, 5pm) and an Administrative Assistant (deadline 7 May, 5pm).
Opportunities
- This Way Up is a two-day UK film exhibition conference packed full of ideas and debates to inspire and enlighten, provoke and challenge. This year’s edition will take place at Broadway Cinema, Nottingham on 3-4 December. Early bird passes are now on sale.
- Due to high demand, Film Hub Midlands will be closing their Film Feels: Obsession fund a few days earlier. Submit your expression of interest by Friday 26 April!
- Tickets are now on sale for Cinema for All’s Community Cinema Conference! Come to Sheffield from 20-22 September for the UK’s biggest celebration of community cinemas, film societies and village screens. If you’ve attended before, you can grab a discounted pass until 30 June.
- Get ready to programme the greatest shows on film this autumn when the next BFI Blockbuster tour celebrates the magic of musicals.
- It’s official – submissions for Depict, Watershed’s super short film competition, are open! Make a tiny film (90 seconds or less) and send to depict.org by 1 July. The winning Depict ’18 short films are also available to screen FREE of charge this year. Click here for more info on booking.
- The great feminist film journal Another Gaze is looking for your favourite Japanese women filmmakers for them to interview next autumn. Whether they work in narrative fiction, documentary, pink, animation or experimental, drop Another Gaze a line on this great Twitter thread.
- British Council Film and BFI NETWORK have launched a new travel grant scheme for new and emerging filmmakers, specifically for international training labs.
- Looking for an UK film festival to enter your film to? 15th Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest, Underwire Festival, Margate Film Festival, The Smalls and the BFI London Film Festival are currently looking for submissions.
- NEW SHOOTS is Shooting People’s film competition which aims to support filmmakers wanting to take the next step in their career. Submit your short by 30 April and be in the running to win £1,000 in film funding, industry mentorship, filmmaking equipment and a public screening of your short in London.
Good reads
- Dimensions UK, UK Cinema Association and Inclusive Cinema have put together a great new autism-friendly screenings guide for cinemas. You can explore this fantastic resource here.
- “How might a revolutionary life be led in violent times? And how might the personal prism of feminist filmmaking offer ways to understand it?” Read Lucy Reynolds’ captivating essay on Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters on our Essays about Margarethe von Trotta microsite. The essay is republished with the kind permission of Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Machine that Kills Bad People collective.
- “So much of the answer is in meeting people where they are, rather than waiting for them to come to you.” Film has the unique gift of giving its viewers the chance to better understand the lives of people from around the world. Having just returned from her work placement at Hanoi’s DOCLAB, our FEDS alumna Umulkhayr Mohamed writes about her experience and what film programmers can do to help rectify cultural blind spots in programming.
- This spring, we’ve sadly lost two legends of our Revolt She Said tour: Agnès Varda and Bibi Andersson. Their legacy lives on in Jemma Desai’s open letter to Agnès in response to her film One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977) and Anna Backman Rogers essay on Mai Zetterling’s The Girls (1968), starring the luminous Bibi Andersson. Both essays were commissioned for the tour’s zine by the great Club des Femmes.
- “Bannered ’Le Ballon Rouge, Where Children Are The New VIPS’, the initiative marks the first time a major film festival anywhere in the world has offered a comprehensive package of family-friendly services to industry attendees.” Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film has launched a new initiative to support film industry professionals attending with children.
- What could the future of cinema look like? We surveyed 250 exhibitors across the sector for our 2017-2018 Annual Report. You can explore the first findings here.