Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- The application deadline for our Sponsorship Success for Film Festivals course is tomorrow, Friday 25 November. Led by sponsorship expert Jennifer Frees, this brand new residential training programme will leave you with a practical toolkit that you can use immediately to attract new partnerships and generate more revenue for your festival. Apply now.
- Registration for Archive Screening Days 2022 closes tomorrow, Friday 25 November. Taking place online on Tuesday 6 December and in-person at BFI Southbank, London on Thursday 8 December, this event gives you the chance to watch carefully curated material from the national, international and alternative archives and new restorations coming into distribution, as well as take part in sessions giving you the inspiration and skills you need to share archive film with your audiences. Register now.
- Writer and programmer Jemma Desai has created a season for The Cinema of Ideas considering the relationship between repetition and differentiation in film programming via Alnoor Dewshi’s short film Latifah and Himli’s Nomadic Uncle. This event is free to attend and is streaming from Monday 5 December. Book now.
- For cinema venues looking to give their front of house staff extra support, or anyone working in an audience-facing role, our new Front of House Online Learning Course offers essential training to give staff the expertise and confidence to make a positive impact in their role. The course is available as an institutional licence or to individuals at a reduced fee. Those currently unemployed can access the course for free. Enrol here.
- In partnership with STUDIOCANAL, we’re bringing a new 4K restoration of Jacques Becker’s poignant crime story Casque d’Or back to UK cinemas from this weekend. Get in touch to book it for your venue.
- Jonas Mekas 100!, our touring programme celebrating the centenary of the pioneering avant-garde filmmaker’s birth, is now available for bookings until 31 January 2023. Spread across five programmes, this tour brings together several of Mekas’s most-celebrated films alongside lesser-seen works. Book it for your venue now.
- Earlier this month we were joined on the Cinema of Ideas by film programmer, critic and filmmaker Tony Rayns for the third part of our conversations reflecting on his influential career at the cutting edge of independent cinema. This discussion focused on Tony’s engagement with contemporary East Asian cinema, touching upon the work of some of the region’s most-acclaimed filmmakers over the last three decades, including Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhangke and Takeshi Kitano. You can catch up with the recording here.
- Missed our Cinema of Ideas panel discussion exploring access and inclusion in the UK countryside and our Right of Way touring programme? You can now watch the recording on our YouTube channel. Alongside the discussion, you can watch sacred space – a new poem by Louisa Adjoa Parker, created in response to the Right of Way programme.
Opportunities
- There’s still some time left to get your pass for This Way Up, taking place in Dundee from Wednesday 30 November – Thursday 1 December. This Way Up is a place for film exhibitors of all types to gather, share ideas, and collectively reimagine the future of our industry. Register now.
- On Wednesday 30 November, Film Hub South East are hosting a BFI Film Academy Lab with Doc’n Roll Film Festival’s Colm Forde and Vanessa Lobon-Garcia. In this session, they will share their passion for discovering under-the-radar music documentaries, their experience of finding a niche in the film festival market and growing the distribution, sales and consulting side to their business. Register now.
- Industry passes are now available for Sheffield DocFest, the UK’s leading documentary festival taking place next year from 14 – 19 June 2023. A super early bird rate is available until Wednesday 7 December. Register now.
- Taking place on Saturday 10 December, BFI Film Academy are hosting an in-person event on Building a Career in Film Programming. The session will explore the practicalities, pleasures and challenges of working in film programming, and give you the chance to hear from people working in programming for major UK cinemas, film festivals and collectives, as well as meet fellow budding programmers over networking drinks. Book now.
- To accompany the BFI season In Dreams are Monsters, In Shorts are Monsters is a curated package of chilling contemporary international short films from Encounters Film Festival, offered as complete programmes at a reduced fee of £20. Titles from each package can be used to supplement your organisation’s planned In Dreams Are Monsters screenings, or presented as stand-alone short film events. If you are interested in screening these programmes or would like a screener, please contact Jonny Tull.
Upcoming film screenings & seasons
- BFI Replay is a free video-on-demand service with thousands of digitised videos and television programmes from the collections of the BFI National Archive and partner UK Regions and Nations Film Archives. Available exclusively at your local library and currently in a limited roll-out, it will allow you to delve into the recorded past for fun, discovery, nostalgia, or research. BFI Replay will launch UK-wide in February 2023.
- As part of the BFI’s In Dreams are Monsters season, Film Noir UK will be screening a double bill of The Curse of the Cat People (1944) and The Spiral Staircase (1946) at the Bristol IMAX on Saturday 3 December. Tickets are available here.
- The Horse Hospital in London are hosting the UK premiere of Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies on Friday 9 December, followed by a Q&A with Vishnu Dass, director of The Steven Arnold Museum and Archives. Book here.
- There are some upcoming screenings as part of Birds Eye View’s Queeriosities From the Archive programme. A continuation of their previous touring programme ‘Queerious’ which explored desire on screen from the 80s to the present day, this selection digs deep in to archives across the UK and beyond, bringing stories of sexual awakenings and realisations, love and lust through a feminist lens from the 1930s to now. More info here.
Good reads/watches/listens
- On Lists and the Documentary Canon
- Understanding the Caribbean of Today Through the trinidad+tobago film festival
- Film Programming as Social Justice Work in the Wake of COVID-19
- UK distributors on the Need for ‘More Trust’ in Black and African Cinema
- Spotlight on Sandy Powell
- bell hooks on Cinema
- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Rise of Expressionism, and the Long Shadow of WWI
- On Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Lost Film’, Ode
- Electric Dreams: Shock Waves Through the Cinema Exhibition Sector
- Cinema Rediscovered’s 2022 Film Critics Workshop Video Essay Commissions
- Casque d’Or Review – Jacques Becker’s Gripping Tragic Drama of Parisian Lowlife
- On Jean-Marie Straub, the French Filmmaker Who Reshaped Political Cinema
- What Kinds of Films Should You Show Your Children?
- MUBI Notebook’s 2022 Cinephile Gift Guide
- On Jocelyne Saab and the Stars of War
- Tang Wei: The Look of Love
- The Pattern Under the Plough: The ‘Old, Weird Britain’ on Film
- On the Early Films of Noriaki Tsuchimoto
- Frederick Wiseman on A Couple
- The Pursuit of a Cinematic Dream, an Interview with Tsai Ming-Liang
- On The Daughter of Dawn’s Vanished World
- Climbing Trees in Two Films by Hiroshi Shimizu
- The Latest Edition of the Journal of Film Preservation
- On the Indispensable Nadine Marsh-Edwards
- On the New Spanish Strange Wave
We post our news & opportunities round-up on the final Thursday of each month. Have something you want included? Email Jake at: jake.abatan@independentcinemaoffice.org.uk
Header image: Flaming Ears (1991), screening as part of Archive Screening Days 2022