The trailer for At Berkeley: our superb new documentary by Fred Wiseman
News
- We’ve still got spaces left on our new training programme REACH: Strategic Audience Development for Independent Exhibitors. Bursaries (via Creative Skillset and the BFI Film Audience Network) are still available towards course places and delegates will get a free – yes, FREE – pass to Cambridge Film Festival. Don’t miss out!
- We’ve also opened applications on Get It Seen, a course giving emerging film producers the inside track on the UK distribution and exhibition sectors.
- Screening Days is growing with the addition of new Hub-based events – in addition to our two ICO National Screening Days – dated for the coming year. This represents a fantastic opportunity to catch all the key upcoming releases!
- We were excited to see so many key documentary filmmakers highlight Frederick Wiseman – director of our upcoming release At Berkeley – as their favourite documentarian in Sight & Sound’s 100 Best Documentaries Poll, which listed Titicut Follies (1967; no. 27 in the main poll, no. 6 in directors’ favourites) and Welfare (1975; no. 47 in the main poll) as his best works.
- We’ve also been adding to our project, Fred Wiseman: Reality and Film, collating documentarian’s responses to their favourite Wiseman films – Joshua Oppenheimer chose Titicut Follies and Eric Steel, Domestic Violence. Read more.
- Studio Ghibli fans everywhere were aghast this week when a decision to halt production was announced, but now it seems the closure may only be temporary – what’s really going on? The Independent takes a closer look.
- The European Film Academy has launched a fund to support jailed Ukranian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov.
- There will be an ICO contingent at Venice Film Festival in a few weeks’ time – check out the line-up, which includes the world premiere of Inarritus Birdman, Fatih Akin’s The Cut, David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, Michael Almereyda’s modern-day Cymbeline and Roy Andersson’s snappily titled A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting the Nature of Existence. Exciting!
Calls for submissions & other opportunities
- For Welsh exhibitors: Film Hub Wales is offering funding in support of audience development projects; and also support for venues screening Welsh made or Welsh language films: Made in Wales.
- Rotterdam International Film Festival is now open for submissions of features and shorts.
- CU Film Festival is calling for submissions of the world’s best independent films.
- Enter VIEW FROM HERE, a competition run by the British Council inviting filmmakers to reinterpret films from their collection.
- The IMDb New Filmmaker Award 2014 is now open for entries.
- Fancy a filmmaking workshop with the directors of Nick Cave film 20,000 Days on Earth? Of course you do.
- Waterford Film Festival needs your short films and scripts for its 8th edition.
- For London-based artist filmmakers, the Nina Stewart Artist Residency 2014/15 is now open for applications.
- Budding archivists: apply for Huntley Film Archives’ Practice of Film Archiving course, running 1-3 Sept.
- And calling ardent culture bloggers… the Guardian needs you!
Essential reading…
- What’s it like to attend a film festival in a country at war? Read this brilliant report from Odessa International Film Festival which has gone ahead despite the conflict in Ukraine.
- A great post on The F Word by one of our programmers, Selina, on the films in the BFI’s Teenage Kicks season this summer.
- An excellent aide-memoire for anyone planning an artists’ film screening from no.w.here.
- Two equally inspiring pieces – the first on Spectacle, an entirely volunteer-run cinema in Brooklyn: “Seven days a week the volunteer-made, volunteer-run, 30-seat screening space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, hustles out a menagerie of films rare, radical, forgotten, misbegotten, offbeat, and controversial which they charge $5 to see”…
- And the second on Budapest Film Zrt, Hungary’s largest art house cinema network, with assistant programmer Orsi Farka’s talking about how and what they programme, their audience development work, and their fight for funding.
- And finally, something completely essential: Moomin rules for a happy life.
