Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- Following the recent closures of key venues, we want to check in with cinemas to assess the current financial health of the sector and feed in data to the current DCMS Committee inquiry. We’re looking for cinema staff in managerial and operational positions to complete our survey by Tuesday 12 September.
- The deadline to register for ID Screening Days is Friday 15 September. It’s taking place online on 26 September and in person at Storyhouse, Chester on 28 September. New additions to the film programme include Girl and Your Fat Friend, with sessions on effective fundraising, how to make screening spaces inclusive, building better workplaces, and more. Explore the full programme.
- Registration is also open for Autumn Screening Days, which takes place at Phoenix, Leicester from 11-12 November, with a selection of films screening online from 13-19 November. The first two titles to be confirmed are The Pot-au-Feu and Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry.
- This month on our blog, Duncan Carson considered whether cinemas should be using content notices, and Amy Cresswell reflected on her experience of attending Young Audiences Screening Days last month.
- We are currently recruiting for new board members, and are especially interested in hearing from people under 30 as well as those who reflect more widely the communities we serve in audiences across the UK, whether that be through heritage, lived experience or access to opportunities. If you’d like to find out more, we have three online information sessions coming up: on 14 September, 15 September and 19 September. The deadline for applications is 22 September.
Opportunities & Resources
- This year’s Distributor Slate Days will take place from 20-21 September at The Ritzy in Brixton. Join Film London for two days of presentations on upcoming theatrical releases, and for opportunities to meet and connect with UK distributors and partners. Email the Slate Days team for more information.
- The Equitable Evaluation Collective is forming a working group to co-create a plan for making evaluation in the UK fairer and more inclusive. They are looking for people with experience of taking part in evaluation activities to join the group and help shape their activities over the next few months. Express your interest by 11 September.
- Big Issue Invest is working with Key Fund to deliver its new Energy Resilience Fund. The fund looks to provide grant and loan support to community and social enterprises to enable them to retrofit energy-generating/saving technology on community-owned or managed buildings, with an initial focus on stabilising or reducing energy costs. To find out more, please contact us to get in touch with Big Issue Invest.
- Could you be a mentor to a young person in Manchester, Merseyside, London or Brighton? Arts Emergency is looking for people to join their mentor scheme and support a young person interested in a career in the cultural sector.
- A retrospective of the work of Yvonne Rainer, a pioneering figure of the American avant-garde movement, took place at the ICA in London earlier this month. The ICA has now partnered with Invisible Women to bring these new restorations to cinemas across the UK. To find out more and express your interest in bringing these films to your audiences, contact the Invisible Women team.
- Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival has opened applications for their annual Programming Fellowship! The fellowship is developmental and mentored, creating opportunities for mutual learning in and around critical and audience-focused film festival curation.
- Applications for Cinema For All’s Glow coaching programme are now open. Explore new ways to develop your community cinema and work towards your next steps with a £200 bursary and coaching support from their team.
- Are you a film writer in need of financial support to attend the 2023 BFI London Film Festival? The LFF Critic Support Fund has been set up to help UK & Ireland-based critics experiencing financial hardship to cover the accreditation costs.
- This year’s Welsh Film Preview Days is taking place at Wyeside Arts Centre, Bulith Wells on Wednesday 20 September. The event is a chance to watch upcoming Welsh releases, including The Eternal Daughter, Chuck Chuck Baby and The Road of Excess.
- The Audience Agency has released findings from the summer 2023 wave of their Cultural Participation Monitor, which looks at a wide variety of factors that affect if and how audiences interact with cultural venues – including their social and environmental values, behavioural expectations, cost-of-living concerns, and comfort with online screening options.
- There are currently roles available at We Are Parable, Broadway, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, The Castle Cinema and more.
Good reads/watches/listens
- On the late Jess Search: Doc Society founder and tireless champion of independent documentary
- A journey through Sight and Sound’s top 100 films and their African complements
- A history of labour unrest on screen
- On the work of the late William Friedkin
- Who needs film critics when studios can be sure influencers will praise their films?
- On Criterion’s programme of films featuring trans men, butch lesbians & gender-nonconforming heroes
- On relaxed screenings: neurodivergence and sound at the cinema
- On Marilyn Monroe’s method acting
- A giant of Japanese cinema rediscovered: the wild parables of Yasuzo Masumura
- On The Watermelon Woman: faking it/making it
- Meaning in the Method: A Conversation with Ellen Burstyn
- A rich counterhistory of masculinity on-screen
- Franz Rogowski on Passages (podcast)
- Naked Miracles: Lars von Trier on Breaking the Waves
- An interview with Sudanese Film Group co-founders Suliman Elnour, Eltayeb Mahdi, and Ibrahim Shaddad
- Song of the Exile: On the shifting fortunes of Jean Grémillon
- All I Wanna Do: On a forgotten jewel from the golden age of teen cinema
- On silent cinema and early exhibition methods (podcast)
- The best Golden Lion winners, ranked
- Cinema Rediscovered’s record-breaking success is hailed as sign of box office hope
- Bette Gordon on Variety in 1984
- My Brother’s Wedding: Charles Burnett reflects on the painful, protracted journey of his nearly-lost masterpiece
- On the censorship link between the Soviet dramas of Kira Muratova and films produced by the Hollywood blacklistees
Header: Girl, screening as part of Inclusion & Diversity Screening Days 2023