Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- Our free Governance Next webinar series kicks off this Thursday! Wherever you are in your governance journey – from starting an organisation, managing growth or needing to make a major leap in how you’ve been working, this training programme will help you set a course for the future. Sign up here.
- Curated by the current cohort of FEDS trainees, Hamro Katha highlights the work of Nepali women filmmakers with a programme of films which tell the stories of women and girls who want their voices heard and dreams shared. Streaming on the Cinema of Ideas from 3 March. Book now.
- We’re looking for three new members to join our Screening Days Advisory Group. This is a paid opportunity and a chance to help shape the strategy for Screening Days & influence the agenda of cinemas in the UK. See full details here.
- Do you know who made your clothes? Stitched Up! Protest and the Garment Industry turns our gaze towards the ladies behind the labels and their fight for workplace justice. Available to stream on the Cinema of Ideas until Saturday 5 March, it features powerful 2019 drama Made in Bangladesh, a panel discussion on how to support garment workers around the world, and an archive newsreel that highlights Britain’s history of textile production and union action.
- In partnership with LUX, we’re looking to commission three artists’ moving image works by Black, Asian and ethnically diverse artists for Right Of Way: an upcoming project challenging the narrative of the rural idyll. Apply by 11 March.
- If you’ve missed any of our discussion events on the Cinema of Ideas you can now watch recordings of these on the ICO YouTube channel, including last month’s fascinating conversation with programmer and writer Ashley Clark.
Opportunities
- BFI FAN is offering funding of up to £10,000 for organisations to present special film events and engagement activity as part of two upcoming programmes centred around the theme of curiosity: Film Feels and Changing Times. See more details on both opportunities here.
- Regional applications are now open to the FAN Film Exhibition Fund 2022, which will support FAN members to engage new audiences with British, independent and international film.
- There are currently roles available at Catford Mews, Olympic Studios, Film Hub Wales, Into Film, Really Local Group, Vertigo Releasing and more.
- BIFA is looking for young film industry professionals to join their Advisory Committee! Candidates must be aged between 18-25 and identify as part of an underrepresented group within the industry.
- Inclusive Cinema is looking for submissions for T.L.C., a project aiming to help programmers and venues increase audiences for trans-led cinema releases and to increase safety for trans audiences and staff in-venue.
- Applications for the 19th edition of the CICAE Arthouse Cinema Training and Mentoring programme are now open. This year’s programme features a revised structure and a new offer for junior and senior arthouse cinema professionals.
- The next UKCA conference will take place from 5-6 April 2022 and will focus on approaches to encourage audiences back to cinemas, as well as a number of sessions delivered by the Cinema Technology Community.
- Sheffield DocFest is open for project entries until Friday 4 March. Apply now to pitch your projects and take part in the MeetMarket for features and series; or the Alternate Realities Talent Market for new media/XR creatives.
Festival dates, seasons and screenings
- Cinenova has launched The Work We Share, a programme of ten newly digitised films from their collection alongside ten new artist response commissions.
- On Sunday 6 March you can see a screening of newly digitised archive films from 1940s Trinidadian cultural pioneer Edric Connor at BFI Southbank, alongside a collection on BFI Player.
- The Essay Film Festival returns in March and April for its eighth edition, with a focus on politically engaged and collectively authored essayistic film practices.
- Jitterbug, the new short film from our board member Ayo Akingbade, is premiering at the Rio on 8 March alongside a live Q&A between Ayo and Andrea Arnold. You can then catch screenings of the film at the Museum of the Home from 9 March – 7 May 2022.
- On 9 March, the Barbican presents Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, a landmark work from the pioneering filmmaker Jonas Mekas, alongside an introduction by curator Herb Shellenberger and a poetry reading by Paulina Pukytė.
- Light After Dark Film Festival runs from 25-27 March with a programme that combines film with performance, music and technology to give you an immersive, intimate and collective encounter with cinema.
- On 7 March, London Drawing Group is hosting an online lecture by Pamela Hutchinson on the unsung silent screen star Asta Nielson, alongside the current season at BFI Southbank.
- BFI FLARE runs from 16-27 March at BFI Southbank and on BFI Player, Watersprite Film Festival is in Cambridge and online from 4-6 March, Wales One World Film Festival runs online until 13 March, Glasgow Film Festival is taking place in Glasgow and cinemas across the UK from 2-13 March, and Hippodrome Silent Film Festival is back in Bo’ness from 16-20 March after their online edition last year.
Good reads/watches/listens
- Short Hand: a podcast guide to making a short film
- Justine Henzell on The Harder They Come at fifty
- TOUCHED: Intimacy and Connection in the Midst of a Pandemic
- On creating descriptive subtitles and improving access to independent film
- On Asta Nielsen, the silent film star who taught Garbo everything
- On the legacy of the Black Filmmaker Magazine International Film Festival
- It’s the Pictures That Got Smaller, a discussion of aspect ratios
- Garrett Bradley’s visit to the Criterion Collection
- Women X on implementing the Dismantling Structural Inequality in Your Cinema toolkit
- Six highlights from the Black Film Archive
- The joy and pain of attending an in-person film festival
- On the action cinema of Céline Sciamma
- On the success of Drive My Car
- Andrea Arnold on the making of Cow
- Mahamat-Saleh Haroun on Lingui, the Sacred Bonds
- On the matrilineal cinema of Jane Birkin
- Joachim Trier’s guilty pleasures
- Dziga Vertov’s long-lost films
- On Sadie Benning’s Video Diaries
- Is Hollywood Killing Radical Queer Film?
- A celebration of music and sound in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Header image: Chandra (dir. Asmita Shrish, Fateme Ahmadi, 2015), screening on the Cinema of Ideas as part of Hamro Katha.