ID Screening Days 2021
(Inclusion & Diversity)

We are delighted to welcome Ashley Clark as our keynote speaker for ID Screening Days.

Ashley Clark is the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection. Previously, he worked as director of film programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and he has curated film series at BFI Southbank, the Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, among other venues. He has contributed writing to publications including Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Sight & Sound, and the Guardian. His first book is Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2015).

While the last few years have seen a string of successful East and South East Asian films – from Parasite to Crazy Rich Asians to The Farewell – a key segment of the potential audience for these titles is sometimes missing from indie screens: British East and South East Asians. This session will examine the British East and South East Asian audience, an often overlooked and marginalised community for cinema exhibition in the UK, sharing findings from data-driven research and demonstrating how to reach and engage more authentically with the BESEA community via appropriate marketing. Backed by successful case studies, Vicki Brown and Chi Thai of programming and screening label MilkTea will share how they mobilised and engaged with BESEA audiences to show BESEA content; used lived experience to deepen their programming approach; and created and marketed successful screenings.

Feature films are still behind in terms of representing a wider global majority. Meanwhile, adventurous shorts filmmakers are proving to be true contenders in creating inclusive practices, both behind and in front of the camera. There remains a gap between audiences and short films, with concerns that short films are a hard sell; but cinemas can address this with some practical changes. In this session, T A P E Collective takes you through the benefits and practicalities of programming short films. Looking at how to work with collaborators, better frame programmes to engage audiences, and at different approaches to including shorts in your programme, this session draws on T A P E’s recent But Where Are You Really From? season as a case study, with three shorts from the season made available on our platform as examples and inspirations.

With Sheryl Miller (Diversity and Inclusion consultant and former Festival Director, Black International Film Festival), Kyla Harris and Matthew Homer (The Other Screen) and Stephen Heinson (Bulldozer Films). Cinema matters because of the connection and community we can find with those we share a cinema space with. But how can we make our cinemas a platform to foster all the communities in our area? Are there barriers that stop indie cinemas ever being a place of safety, comfort and mind-expansion for all? In this session, we look at three case studies of groups who found new routes to audiences by approaching the challenge of who is welcome in a space in new ways.

Fingers on buzzers for our first ever Screening Days quiz! Hosted by quiz master Ti Singh (Film Hub South West/Bristol Bad Film Club), this end-of-event social will give you a chance to flex your trivia with film friends from across the country. You don’t need to know your Wookiee from your Ewok to join in the fun; it’s just a great way to get to know your fellow cinema people and (potentially!) send your team to crowning glory.

Inclusion work is most successful and sustainable when it is everyone’s responsibility. So, this year, we’ve aligned our workshops with some of the major areas of operation within cinemas and festivals, to try and arrive at practical answers about what inclusion work means in your specific role. We also hope they’ll prove a platform to connect with others doing the same work, to build support networks and better outcomes long after we close the Zoom call. We’ve invited facilitators to each of the below workshops to speak about their work and spark discussions about positive changes we could make. We’ll then get into groups to discuss common challenges and arrive at some thinking on shared solutions we can work on now and in the future.

These workshops will be limited capacity and will require sign-up in advance. We will circulate sign-up links to registered delegates on Friday 10 September.

In this workshop, we’ll look at the challenges to encouraging everyone to join us for big screen experiences. How can we create marketing that is accessible to all, with messages that are thoughtful, welcoming and unbiased? How can we ensure our outreach work creates lasting connections and is supportive rather than extractive? And how can we care for ourselves and protect our energy throughout the endless task of marketing our work?

Whatever we show on our screens, if the experience of visiting our venues and events isn’t inclusive, we won’t build lasting connections with audiences. So, what are the practical things we need in place to ensure our staff and audiences feel safe and able to have fun, whatever their particular needs? We’ll look at everything from staff reporting structures to toilet design to pricing to find out how to create intentional, flourishing spaces in which we can share great cinema.

What we show on our screens is why independent cinemas matter, but how do we make sure our programmes reflect the communities we serve? How do we make sure everyone sees themselves on screen and encourage people to take a chance on films that seem to have nothing to do with their lives? In this workshop, we’ll look at the practical challenges of growing audiences via our programming, as well as new models that the pandemic has opened up.

Access work is often done at the margins of other work and in isolation. Whether access work is your whole role, part of your job, or something you aspire to, this workshop is for you. We want to bring freelancers, volunteers and salaried staff together for a rare opportunity to share their work and consider better ways of collaborating. Key supporters of inclusive cinema will join us for a candid discussion on how we can make this work central and sustainable to exhibition.

In this workshop, we will discuss Through the Night and its themes of care and inclusion, exploring the best ways to grow audiences for this title specifically, and generating wider learnings on how to maximise the impact of similar documentaries in your venues. Please try to watch Through the Night before you attend.