Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.
ICO News
- To celebrate the 30th anniversary of South African Freedom Day, we have partnered with Cinema Africa! and Maona Art to bring a 4K restoration of Mapantsula (1988) to UK cinemas from April 2024. We are touring the film now to raise awareness of the anniversary, to connect with South Africans across the country, and to give audiences the chance to enjoy this seminal work after many years of either censorship or barriers to access. Get in touch if you’d like to book a screening!
- Applications are now open for Revisiting Your Cinema Business Model, a new training course to help cinemas adapt to financial challenges, profound changes in audience behaviour, and transformations in the film industry at large. Designed for those in leadership or senior management roles and open to BFI FAN members from across the UK, this training programme has been created by the ICO in collaboration with Steve Mapp, former CEO of Broadway Cinema, for the BFI Film Audience Network.
- We’re busy getting everything ready for Spring Screening Days, which takes place at BFI Southbank and online from 8-17 March! In-person tickets are now sold out, but there’s still time to grab an online pass. Check out the full programme.
- The 22nd Borderlines Film Festival, which the ICO helps programme, takes place from 1-17 March at 23 independent venues across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Borders. This year’s programme offers previews of some of the best new films from around the world, as well as the opportunity to catch up with recent festival favourites, including All of Us Strangers, Perfect Days and La Chimera.
Opportunities & Resources
- BFI FAN has announced a new UK-wide season – Art of Action – exploring the cinematic artistry, skill and craft involved in creating iconic action sequences, as well as engaging with the historic roots and cross-cultural influences of action cinema. More information will be coming soon, but for now FAN members are invited to Watershed on 25 April to join the team and experts involved to explore how you might develop your own activity.
- Expressions of interest for Screen Argyll’s Sea Change Development Lab are now open. The Lab invites women at any stage in their film and screen industries career for mentoring, skill-sharing and discussion on the beautiful isle of Tiree.
- Join Oska Bright in Brighton for their 2024 Festival Industry Day, where they’ll be exploring how to practically develop your cinema’s programming for learning-disabled and autistic audiences and prepare the best possible welcome.
- The second round of the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants programme is now open and they’re looking for film and creative tech partners to apply. It’s a £1 million grants programme looking to support new cultural collaborations between UK artists, arts professionals and organisations and their peers in nearly 50 countries around the world.
- The BFI FAN: Access Directory is a new resource for UK film exhibitors. It offers guidance, toolkits, and practical actions for planning accessible film events for deaf and disabled audiences, and is a valuable starting point to establish sustainable and high-quality accessible practices for your screenings.
- Early bird passes are now on sale for the 2024 Community Cinema Conference, which takes place on Saturday 22 June at The Workstation, Sheffield.
- The Film & TV Charity’s Sir Horace Ové grant has been created to help under-represented people working behind the scenes in film & cinema to access opportunity and navigate barriers to career progression. Grants of up to £500 are available.
- Queer East is launching an Emerging Critics Project, which will run from April to May with six participants. This series of sessions is aimed at emerging writers who have never had work published in national media outlets or notable online publications and aims to foster a strong creative voice for aspiring film critics.
- Ever thought of starting your own community cinema? Apply for Cinema For All’s Launch coaching programme and receive a £300 bursary and support from their team to help get your screenings off the ground.
- There are currently roles available at the BFI, Klassiki, HOME, Screen Argyll, Glasgow Film, and more.
- Four Corners is offering two 12-month paid internships as part of its new National Lottery Heritage Fund project, The People’s Gallery. This is an exciting opportunity to work on Four Corners’ Archive collection whilst gaining skills in archiving and collections management, and experience in delivering community and exhibition projects.
- One of our trusted professional coaches, Janet Evans, who we’ve worked with on various training courses over the years, has a new blog series out on the psychology of intuition and decision-making at work which you might find interesting.
Good Reads
- A rare, newly translated piece of criticism by Jean Eustache on Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be
- Demystifying the world of independent film distribution (podcast)
- Filming and Forgetting Taipei: On the life and work of Edward Yang
- On the photography of Wim Wenders
- On the second era of Frederick Wiseman’s filmography (podcast)
- On Margaret Duras’s newly-translated My Cinema
- On the distinct costumes and style of Sofia Coppolla’s films (podcast)
- This Must Be the Place: On Otto Preminger’s Bunny Lake Is Missing
- Ehsan Khoshbakht on MoMA’s Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979 series
- On the story of David Schickele’s 1971 film, Bushman (podcast)
- On two films which stood out at this year’s Sundance Film Festival
- Alone (Together) with the Music: Songs in the films of Aki Kaurismäki
- Tales from the International Buster Keaton Convention
- Some of the best posters for the films of Sergei Parajanov
- On Not a Pretty Picture, Martha Coolidge’s 1975 debut film
- The Weight of Being: On the early work of Chantal Akerman
- Realising Africa: On Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye
- Film Comment’s coverage of Berlinale 2024
- Indiscreet charms: On the movies Luis Buñuel made in exile
- Ordinary Magic: On Phạm Thiên Ân’s hypnotic debut feature Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
Header image: Mapantsula (dir. Oliver Schmitz, 1988)