Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- We’ve launched our 2022-2023 Annual Report! This special edition takes a look back at the impact the ICO has had on the sector since its inception in 2003, and gives an overview of all the work we’ve done over the last 12 months to help ensure everyone in the UK has access to life-changing cinema.
- Enrol onto our new Environmental Sustainability Online Course, created in partnership with pioneering climate action organisation Julie’s Bicycle. Presented by wildlife conservationist Chantelle Lindsay and featuring case studies from Depot, HOME, and Mammoth – A Climate Action Cinema, this course is your guide to meeting the climate crisis head-on.
- We’re currently recruiting for new board members! We 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. We’ll be hosting three Q&A sessions where you can meet some of the current Trustees and staff and hear a bit more about what the role entails.
- Young Audiences Screening Days takes place next week! Registration for in-person attendance is now closed, but if you’d like to join online then there’s still time to sign up.
- We updated our EDI Action Plan with details of work we’ve undertaken since November, including the creation of an EDI Working Group & facilitating financial support for several venues to undertake audience development work for Rye Lane.
- Here on the blog, the ICO’s Director Catharine Des Forges and Senior Programmer (Projects) Selina Robertson reflected on the last two years of our innovative online platform, The Cinema of Ideas, and some of our staff shared their favourite films from last month’s Cannes Film Festival.
- We’d like to congratulate our client venue Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds, on the completion of their redevelopment project. They reopen their doors this Friday, following three years of closure.
Opportunities & Resources
- BFI FAN members have until 5pm on Friday 30 June to present seasons, events and screenings that celebrate the work of Powell & Pressburger and their influence, as part of Cinema Unbound.
- The Freedom Machine is a new archive film from Scottish curator Jo Reid, celebrating the significance of the bicycle in the emancipation of women. It’s available for cinemas to book from 17 July, read the exhibitor pack to find out more.
- Taking place in July, Act Green 2023 is a project from Indigo Ltd which aims to build understanding of audience attitudes towards the role of cultural organisations and their audiences in tackling the climate crisis. Register here to take part.
- Applications are now open for the 20th edition of CICAE’s Arthouse Cinema Training. Taking place from 30 October to 5 November 2023, it’s a one-week intensive programme bringing together exhibition professionals from around to world to gain in-depth insight into the management of independent cinemas.
- Taking place at Cinema Rediscovered in July, Reframing Film is a chance for BFI FAN members to join some of the most inspiring voices in rep and archive film exhibition and distribution to explore alternative ways of connecting older films with a new wave of cinema-goers, and to get inspired to broaden repertory cinema beyond the comfort of the mainstream.
- Planning to screen a silent film with a live score? The band Memorials are available to book for live scores, following their fantastic live score for Häxan at Exeter Phoenix last year, as part of our In Dreams Are Monsters UK tour.
- Clore Leadership and Contact Theatre in Manchester are hosting a conference on Tuesday 18 July for early-career creative change-makers, exploring the theme of care-fuelled leadership with a host of leaders, trailblazers & creative entrepreneurs.
- Can’t make the Arts Marketing Association Conference in person? You can purchase a Digital Ticket until Monday 10 July.
- There are currently roles available at Film and Video Umbrella, Indy Cinema Group, Genesis Cinema, Film Hub North and more.
Upcoming festivals & seasons
- Cinema Rediscovered is taking place in Bristol next month! The full programme has now been announced, featuring new restorations and rare screenings of films from Chantal Akerman, Sofia Coppola, Jan Švankmajer, Jean Eustache, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, György Fehér, and more.
- Taking place at the Rio Cinema on Sunday 2 July, Misery Movies is an afternoon of community and filmmaking about mental health, nature and QTIBPOC futures, featuring a very special programme of hand-picked shorts by UK-based filmmakers of the global majority asking the important questions about rest, right of way and resilience.
- Where Were You in 1992? is a special programme of films at the Barbican next month, that brings together works by Amanda Egbe, Rastko Novaković and Paul Halliday that challenge institutional violence and racism and explores legacies of resistance. Taking place Wednesday 19 July.
- At BFI Southbank this August there’s a season celebrating 100 years of the unique talent that was Ousmane Sembène, as well as a season of queer crime films, Be Gay Do Crime.
- Something Wild at Broadway is a weird weekend of cinematic chaos and excess, taking place 14-16 July, and featuring films from Dario Argento, Věra Chytilová, Ken Russell, Martin Scorsese, and Kenneth Anger.
- SAFAR, the UK’s largest festival of Arab cinema comes to Glasgow Film Theatre for the first time in July, showcasing three fantastic new films from Algeria, Morocco and Palestine, plus a free family-friendly screening of the beautifully animated Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo.
- Drama and Desire: The Films of Youssef Chahine is screening at Ciné Lumière this July. The season is curated by Elhum Shakerifar at BFI, in cultural partnership with Ciné Lumière and SAFAR film festival.
Good reads/watches/listens
- On the radical feminist collective that blazed a trail in 1970s Sheffield
- On the late Glenda Jackson, an actress unafraid to speak her mind
- The documentary film industry is in crisis
- On the brilliant, contradictory vision of Kenneth Anger
- Thelma & Louise: The film that gave women firepower, desire and complex inner lives
- The New Yorker on the best films of the year so far
- Films are best before noon
- A brief history of Cannes
- The woman who styled your favourite ’80s teen movies
- How the Marvel Cinematic Universe swallowed Hollywood
- MUBI’s Cannes 2023 roundup
- On the cinema of artificial intelligence
- 38 films Wes Anderson wants you to see
- John Waters on Hairspray at 35
- On the last days of Jean-Marie Straub
- Margot Robbie takes Architectural Digest inside the Barbie dreamhouse
- Spider-Verse artists say working on the sequel was ‘death by a thousand paper cuts’
- Past Lives: A tour of New York City with Greta Lee and Celine Song
- On the third edition of experimental film festival Prismatic Ground
- An interview with Wang Bing on his new film, Youth (Spring)
- sensor, a new artist publishing series featuring contemporary still images by moving image artists.
- On the films of Béla Tarr, Ágnes Hranitzky, and László Krasznahorkai
- Pedro Costa on his new short, The Daughters of Fire
- Emerson Goo on Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But…
- On Foucault, freelancing, and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder
- On Lorenza Mazzetti’s Kingdom for Children
Header: from Theater Camp, screening as part of Young Audience Screening Days 2023. Image Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.