Happy New Year!
- We’re kicking it off preparing for our next Screening Days events, firstly Screening Days North & North West Central (North by Northwest?) in New Brighton on 25th & 26th January 2015. The line-up includes Still Alice (starring Julianne Moore in a now Golden Globe-winning performance), Ava DuVernay’s civil rights drama Selma and Xavier Dolan’s ecstatically praised Mommy. There are limited places left on a first-come, first-served basis.
- In February we’ll run Screening Days Scotland alongside Glasgow Film Festival, where we’ll screen Carol Morley’s The Falling, BAFTA-winning documentarian Morgan Matthews’ X + Y and our upcoming release by acclaimed Portuguese auteur Vtor Gonalves, The Invisible Life. More films to follow.
- Boyhood justifiably won Best Picture (Drama) & Director awards at the Golden Globes 2015 last night – see all winners here, commentary by Peter Bradshaw (with Oscar predictions) here (and jokes here). The BAFTA nominations are also out, with The Grand Budapest Hotel out in front (though sadly no noms for Mr. Turner or Selma) and nominees for the Oscars will be announced this Thursday.
- Our Artists’ Moving Image Network is fully up and running with programmes in place at the four lead venues – FLUX at Barn, Film Lab at The Dukes, kinetics at Kinokulture and ASPECT at The Maltings.
- The end of January is the deadline for both our One-to-Ones – perfect if 2015 is the year you want to make changes at your venue and need affordable advice on anything from audience development to fundraising – and our Tech Skills scheme for venues in need of bespoke technical support.
Calls for submissions, opportunities
- The London International Animation Festival needs your animated shorts.
- Open City Docs Festival – celebrating the best in non-fiction contemporary filmmaking – is open to submissions.
- Deaffest is looking for films made by deaf filmmakers, or films with a significant deaf involvement. Submit.
- Reel Islington Short Film Award submissions close on 19th January – the theme: Urbanscapes.
- Submissions are open for Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015 and the Festival has also opened submissions to its MeetMarket and Crossover Market events for filmmakers hoping to access to the international doc film market.
- St. Albans Film Festival is open to submissions until 3rd February.
- Oska Bright Film Festival is calling for films made by disabled filmmakers.
- Zln Film Festival needs your films for its 55th edition.
- Plymouth Film Festival is looking for shorts by national & international filmmakers.
Read, programme, sign
- Alongside London Short Film Festival, Sophie Monks Kaufman explores the future of short film in Little White Lies.
- A small but perfectly formed new cinema museum in Dorset.
- Birds Eye View Film Festival has announced its closure.
- Read about Obala Meeting Point, a cult Sarajevo cinema that hosts the city’s acclaimed film festival.
- New Year programming inspiration – we like this BFI list of ten films about making a fresh start – also this one on EPIC documentaries (highlighting Frederick Wiseman, director of our 2014 release At Berkeley) and Eric Rohmer for beginners, written around BFI Southbank’s Rohmer season running from now until March.
- Check out Senses of Cinema’s Best Films of 2014 poll with contributors including Carmen Gray, Olaf Mller and Kieron Corliss.
- And looking ahead in 2015: new films by Richard Linklater, Wim Wenders, Todd Haynes, Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Lucretia Martel, the Coen brothers, Terence Malick, Cameron Crowe, Andrea Arnold, Noah Baumbach, David Gordon Green, Derek Cianfrance, Ben Wheatley, Paolo Sorrentino – all are amongst the most anticipated films of 2015 in these two lists from Indiewire and Fandor.
- Finally, sign this: a petition to help save London’s much-loved Curzon Soho, now under threat from Crossrail.