Watersprite is the UK’s largest student film festival, bringing emerging international film talent together in Cambridge for a weekend of events, networking and short film screenings to celebrate the future of film.
On 10 December 2022, members of the Watersprite Film Festival Student Committee travelled from Cambridge to BFI Southbank in London to participate in a day of talks, networking and screenings run by BFI Film Academy and Film Hub South East.
Watersprite Film Festival has this year, for the first time in the festival’s 14-year history, has been able to run regular film screening events in the run up to the main festival, thanks to generous funding from Film Hub South East. Our events department, headed up by Flora O’Neill, has put together a wonderfully diverse programme of six films to be screened at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse with the aim of introducing 16-30-year-olds in the Cambridge area to a wide range of independent cinema. So far, we have screened Academy Award-winner Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which inspired conversations about the representation of black queerness in the mainstream, and, as part of our ‘Introduction to Banned Cinema’, we screened Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi, 2008), a coming-of-age biographical animation about a girl’s life in pre-revolutionary Iran which was banned briefly in Iran when it was released.
At BFI Southbank, the Watersprite Committee (Flora O’Neill, Head of Events; Sophie Stemmons, Head of Communications; Sofya Boruleva, Head of Alumni Relations; Patricia Jorgensen, Head of Awards; and Charlotte Matheson, Festival Director) were able to meet people from other South East-based film initiatives to discuss their programming experiences. We met and exchanged advice about what had gone well in our events and what we thought we could improve on for upcoming screenings. It was great to be able to speak with other Young Programmers about what kinds of films they had been screening!
Next, we had a talk from Caroline Wilson, a writer and creative film curator, who spoke about what curation is and how to stay true to your values when curating your events. This was really thought-provoking, and the Watersprite Committee had some valuable discussion amongst ourselves afterwards, talking about how we want people who enter the Watersprite screening space to feel when they come to watch a film and how we can best reflect all the different tastes on the committee, not only when choosing which films to screen, but in how we present them, from graphic design to deciding how people debrief after watching a film together.
In the afternoon, we were invited to sit in on a panel discussion about developing a career in film programming. This was brilliant as the panel was composed of four speakers from completely different backgrounds (Isabel Moir, Independent Cinema Office; Isra Al Kassi; T A P E Collective, Sam Barnett, BFI Film Academy; Siavash Minoukadeh, freelance curator), talking about careers in programming from a refreshingly practical perspective. Isra Al Kassi, the founder of T A P E Collective, spoke about creating a film club as a side hustle and about the importance of staying positive when you run a screening and nobody turns up! One of the other panellists spoke about a fund for setting up community cinemas in rural areas and how to support yourself when working freelance. It was a really valuable discussion and led into a screening of five brilliant short films that had been funded by BFI NETWORK.
The day closed with networking drinks where the committee chatted to the attendees of the BFI Film Lab Programming Event and left feeling very inspired for our first screening of 2023!