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This year the ICO celebrates its 20th anniversary. Founded to ensure that everyone in the UK has access to life-changing cinema, the ICO has come a long way since 2003. We’ve grown from three members of staff to 23, offering programming advice and consultancy, distributing film work of cultural importance, delivering Screening Days and training, and since 2018, running Film Hub South East as part of the BFI Film Audience Network.
The sector faces challenges in 2023, but we still believe in the power of cinema to enhance people’s lives and in our core vision of all communities having access to a thriving and equitable independent cinema culture. We owe tremendous thanks to the BFI for their continuing support, as well as to all our partners, sponsors, friends and champions over the years.
This special edition of our Annual Report provides an overview of the work we’ve done over the last twelve months to try to achieve this, as well as looking back at the impact we’ve made over the past twenty years.
We hope you enjoy reading the report in full, but here are some of the highlights from our work this past year:
- The venues across our Programming Network screened 947 films, generating £5.3m from 797,202 admissions
- We held five Screening Days events, where we welcomed delegates from 363 unique organisations, 31% of whom were attending for the first time
- We ran a nationwide tour of some of film history’s trailblazing horror titles as part of the BFI’s blockbuster season In Dreams Are Monsters, and celebrated the centenary of a revolutionary avant-garde filmmaker with Jonas Mekas 100!
- We paired new artists’ commissions with historical archive films to examine access to the UK countryside in our Right of Way programme, and commissioned a new archive film documenting memories of cinema-going with Projectionism
- We brought new restorations of Casque d’Or and the films of Fronza Woods to UK cinemas, and highlighted Britain’s pioneering women documentary makers with The Camera is Ours
- We hosted 17 events and screened 21 films in the second year of our online platform, The Cinema of Ideas, and supported three emerging curators to deliver their own programmes
- Our training courses reached 81 people from 79 organisations and 15 countries. These included: our online Data-Driven Film Exhibition Sector Forum, a Sponsorship Roundtable for UK festivals, and the 11th edition of our Developing Your Film Festival international training programme
- 2023 also saw us launch a brand new training course: Sponsorship Success for Film Festivals, which offers international film festivals a complete guide to transforming their sponsorship potential and generating more revenue
- We ran the sixth editions of our FEDS training scheme and our Elevate: Introduction to Leadership course
- We launched two new courses on our Online Learning Platform: Screening Films in Your Community and our Front of House Workers Online Course
- We partnered with The Bridge Group to run the first UK Film Exhibition Workforce Survey in over a decade
- Film Hub South East’s membership grew to 341, an increase of 14%, with 188 members attending our training courses and events
- Through Film Hub South East, we awarded 31 projects a total of £210,399 funding from the National Lottery via the FAN Film Exhibition Fund
- Our Young Film Programmers’ Network grew to 45 groups with 170 young film programmers spread across the South East of England
- Through BFI NETWORK South East, we awarded funding to nine teams via the Short Film Fund and seven teams through the Early Development Fund, and engaged 307 filmmakers through in-person events
- We announced the first eight beneficiaries of our Miles Ketley Memorial Fund, supporting British filmmakers who have already made their first short or feature
- Our Advice and Information service answered 730 enquiries and our guides were downloaded 2,466 times
- We advertised 647 positions on our Jobs Board
- We published 42 articles on the ICO ICO Blog which were viewed 20,267 times
The sector faces challenges in 2023, but we still believe in the power of cinema to enhance people’s lives and in our core vision of all communities having access to a thriving and equitable independent cinema culture.
Catharine Des Forges
Director of the Independent Cinema Office
If you have any questions about the contents of the report or would like to learn more about our work, please email us.