Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- This week we published our 2023-24 Annual Report. The ICO exists so that everyone can experience life-changing cinema, wherever they live and whoever they are. We hope you enjoy reading about how we’ve been working towards that goal over the last year.
- Thank you to everyone who joined us for ID Screening Days this month, whether in person at Watershed or online. We hope you found the sessions as inspiring and invigorating as we did. Our next event will be Autumn Screening Days, which will take place at Broadway Cinema, Nottingham from 16-18 November, with a preceding audience development day for theatrical exhibitors on Friday 15 November and films screening online for a week from 18 November.
Opportunities & Resources
- Explore ways of connecting with a new wave of cinema goers at this year’s Cinema Rediscovered Reframing Film Industry Sessions. Expect insights about navigating the presentation of sensitive or challenging materials; join a discussion with the BFI National Archive about how UK-wide film exhibitors might play a bigger role in opening up the archive from film on film to lesser-known materials; get insights into the world of restorations and find out what is coming up from some of the UK’s leading repertory distributors.
- Plus, Cinema Rediscovered has launched a UK and Ireland-wide touring programme featuring titles from this year’s festival, which will be available to screen from between August 2024 – January 2025. Take a look at the programme details to see which films you could bring to your venue.
- Help The Film and TV Charity rewrite the script by taking part in the biggest and most important mental health survey for people working behind the scenes. Share your story and take the survey now.
- Calling all UK-based film curators! Park Circus is teaming up with Cinema Rediscovered to invite you to pitch a four to five title rep season idea curated from the Park Circus catalogue. Applications close 12 July.
- 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 expert team.
- A reminder that registration is open for BFI FAN CON! Join cinemas, festivals and film exhibitors from across the UK in Belfast from 11-13 September. There’ll be lots of networking opportunities, case studies of some of the most exciting FAN projects and innovative approaches to programming, marketing, operations and much more. Book ASAP to grab one of the last few Early Bird tickets!
- Looking for programming ideas for family audiences for the school holidays? Discovery Film Festival’s Greatest Hits Package is a great place to start! The package combines the very best short films in the Festival’s 20-year history for audiences aged 3+.
- There’s still time to express interest in screenings from the Art of Action season menu, which can be supported with up to £500. Taking place from October 2024, this season will celebrate the pioneers of action cinema who have kept audiences on the edge of their seats throughout film history. Cinemas, festivals and multi-arts organisations can now apply to present seasons, events and screenings as part of the season.
- Applications for the 2024 BFI Film Academy Specialist Programming Residential are now open! This is a cinema programming training programme that takes place at Showroom Cinema in Sheffield. Open to 16 to 19-year-olds from across the UK, the course provides the chance to learn about film programming, marketing and distribution and eventually put on a film festival at Showroom.
- The deadline to apply for Reel Impact, The Film and TV Charity’s brand-new programme to support Black and Global Majority creatives working behind the scenes in film, TV, or cinema, is looming this Sunday 30 June. Individuals can apply for grants of up to £10,000, and organisations up to £25,000.
- This week’s BFI FAN Green Hour webinar on sustainability in festivals had to be postponed. Keep an eye out on The Bigger Picture to see details when the new date is announced.
- The Aberdeen Belmont Cinema has sat empty since October 2022. Belmont Community Cinema Ltd is now running a crowdfunding campaign to refurbish and reopen the venue as a vital community-led, independent cinema for all.
- Over in France, the LUMINOR Hôtel de Ville, the last independent cinema in the Marais district of Paris, is threatened with closure. Sign the petition to show your support.
Good Reads
- Remembering Donald Sutherland
- Yuliya Solntseva: the hidden history of the Soviet Union’s original queen of film
- Anora: Sean Baker’s demolition of the Pretty Woman fantasy is his most vivid creation yet
- Paris’s La Clef cinema saved from eviction
- How UK indie exhibitors are engaging younger audiences with arthouse cinema
- ‘There is no single African gaze’: how Pan-African film season Tigritudes came together
- Chantal Akerman: the private and the public (video)
- Remembering Anouk Aimée
- The single ‘most useful thing’ cultural organisations should learn about AI
- On film sound and how it is restored
- Dorothy Arzner and Jill Craigie’s Working Girls
- Without Limits: twelve memorable performances from the late Donald Sutherland
- The Pebble in the Shoe: an interview with Agnieszka Holland
- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Powell before Pressburger
- Yorgos Lanthimos’ transgressive dance sequences
- The 30 year gap: why did it take so long for an Indian film to play in Cannes competition?
- What’s Next for Film Festivals: patterns of growth and recovery
- Susan Seidelman in conversation with Willow Catelyn Maclay
- Let There Be Light: Some of the best Cannes titles from new and emerging voices
- On Topkapi: A look at the dynamic heist film that embodied the electricity of its filmmaker and star
- What the motorcycle means to Hollywood
- Furiosa crystalizes the power—and limits—of Cli-Fi
- What has any of this got to do with cinema? A Conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum
- Nitrate Kisses: On the George Eastman Museum’s Nitrate Picture Show
- Hiroshi Shimizu’s floating worlds
- On the history, present, and future of the ‘trans film image’ (podcast)
- The 3 C’s for film festival success
- Forever Young: the beautiful boyhood of Stand by Me, nearly four decades on
- Beijing Watermelon: On Nobuhiko Obayashi’s newly restored, slippery gem of a film
- Immediate Sensory Experiences: In conversation with Ernie Gehr
- Davy Chou and Kavich Neang on the influence of Cambodian history on their work, and the thin line between documentary and fiction
- The best of MUBI Notebook’s Poster of the Day
- How documentary filmmakers are really making ends meet
Header image: Le samouraï (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), screening at Cinema Rediscovered. Image courtesy of Janus Films.