ICO news
- We’re excited to be heading (for the first time in Screening Days history!) to Lewes’ lovely Depot Cinema for our Summer Screening Days. If you’d like to spend three days by the sea, watching films and networking with colleagues from across the UK, book your pass by Friday 14 June. Also, if you work or volunteer in exhibition and are aged between 18-30, remember that you can grab one of our discounted passes, starting at £12.5o.
- Recently featured on The Guardian, 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. 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. Read more and book this vital film now.
- 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.
- What would summer be without attending a great outdoor screening? If you’d like to organise one yourself, our (free!) online guide is here to help you with that.
- Programming is at the heart of what we do at the ICO. Our expert team of programmers work closely with all UK distributors to make sure your venue has the best set of films for your audiences. To find out more, get in touch with our programming team today.
Opportunities
- There’s still time to participate in National Lottery Cinema Day! To celebrate the National Lottery’s support for film, on Sunday 25 August, National Lottery Cinema Day (NLCD) will be returning bigger and better. NLCD is an event from Camelot and the BFI where Lotto players can claim a free cinema ticket at participating venues. Camelot will then reimburse venues for the free tickets, up to an agreed maximum value. Register your venue by 3 June by clicking here.
- Screening Support is now open for Film Feels: Obsession, this summer’s Major Programme from Film Hub Midlands. Apply now for up to £500 to present films, mini seasons, or events as part of the season.
- 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. Grab your early bird pass by 10 July!
- FAN members! As BFI Young Audiences lead, Film London would love to hear your thoughts on their plans for a new FAN Young Audiences National Ticketing Scheme. You can read through their proposal here and input your feedback by completing their short survey.
- Tickets are now on sale for Cinema for All’s Community Cinema Conference! Head 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.
- And while we’re on it… why not start a community cinema this summer? Applications are now open for Cinema for All’s next two coaching schemes, Launchpad and Launchpad Next Gen (for under 30’s). These schemes feature free coaching sessions and bursary support to cover the cost of your first two screenings. Deadline for applications is Thursday 6 June.
- 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.
- Get ready to programme the greatest shows on film this autumn when the next BFI Blockbuster tour celebrates the magic of musicals.
- Looking for an UK film festival to enter your film to? The BFI London Film Festival, Underwire Festival, Fringe! Queer Film and Arts Fest, The Smalls and Margate Film Festival are currently looking for submissions.
- Save the date: as announced in Cannes, the next Europa Cinemas conference will take place 21-24 November 2019 in Lisbon.
Good reads
- May was all about Cannes at the ICO headquarters. Ahead and after their marathon film viewings and queuing at the festival, we were lucky enough to get our programming team to reveal which films they were most looking forward to and which films impressed them the most.
- Speaking of Cannes, IndieWire reached out to the cinematographers whose feature films are premiering at this year’s festival to find out which cameras and lenses they used and, more importantly, why these were the right tools to create the visual language of their films. The result is an utterly fascinating Cinematography Survey.
- “Paternalistic social engineering or make-Britain-great-again utopianism? A new archive film compilation takes a look at the UK’s controversial postwar towns.” Read the Guardian’s piece on our new archive film programme New Towns, Our Town.
- “It’s not just a way of diversifying audiences, it also brings to life the theatre’s history, and civic mission.” Over the last 75 years, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has built a reputation for producing innovative shows on stage and an innovative learning programme – as well as offering any member of the audience the chance to attend a performance for as little as 50p.
- Dimensions UK, UK Cinema Association and Inclusive Cinema have put together a great autism-friendly screenings guide for cinemas. You can explore this fantastic resource here.
- “While it’s usually the art that makes a lasting impression, a recent initiative at The Jewish Museum to improve the user experience of online transactions aimed to make the process of purchasing a ticket as enjoyable as a visit to the Museum itself.” Read how New York’s Jewish Museum redesigned the user experience of its online ticketing systems with a human-centered approach.
- On Thursday 2 May, we organised our Young Audiences Screening Day at HOME Manchester and were thrilled to welcome many emerging film programmers from all across the UK to the event. Sophie Willard from Saffron Screen Young Film Programmers shared with us her experience of the day.
- “After 50 years of fearless determination as a director”, the great Margarethe von Trotta received a lifetime achievement honour on 3 May at the German Film Awards. To further celebrate this and von Trotta’s pioneering work, Alliance of Women Film Journalists’ chose her as their Spotlight director last month. Four of her seminal films are now available for UK bookings via our The Personal is Political: The Films of Margarethe von Trotta tour.
- While there are many training opportunities for filmmakers, there is only one Developing Your Film Festival. While we get ready for the training course’s next edition in July, Programmer & Artistic Director for Kino Dzieci – The Kids Film Festival, Joanna Żak shared with us what she learnt at the course last year.