ICO News
- This month we published our 2020-2021 Annual Report. We’ve had to adapt the way we work and the projects we could deliver over the past year, but despite these challenges, our main goal of ensuring everyone in the UK has access to life-changing cinema remains the same. We hope you enjoy reading about all of our projects from the last twelve months, but you can see some highlights here.
- Do you remember the first film you saw at the cinema? We’re looking for contributions about your favourite cinema-going memories to use in a new short film by Sarah Wood, part of an exciting project that we’ll be announcing soon.
- There’s still time to join the Culture Restart Cinema Tracker. Developed in collaboration with Indigo Ltd, it’s a free tool which helps you understand how your attendees are feeling and plan for continuing a successful reopening.
- After a 15-month delay, our 5th group of FEDS trainees finally began their placements this week. This year’s participants will be undertaking traineeships at five exhibitors across the UK.
- We’ve made two of the archive films from our 2020 Second Sight Tour (The People’s Account and Omega Rising Women of Rastafari) available for exhibitors to book for online or in-venue screenings. See details here.
- This month we published blogs on strategies for programming short animation and a roundup of Dial F For Freelancer’s recent industry roundtable. If you’d like to pitch a piece for our blog, please read our guidelines here.
- Thank you to everyone who attended this year’s Young Audiences Screening Days. We want to open up our Screening Days events and have created a new Advisory Group to help us do so. Read more and submit your ideas and comments here. And finally, watch this space for open calls for our upcoming Inclusion & Diversity and Archive Screening Days events!
Opportunities
- Raising Films is running How We Work Now, a survey which asks how COVID-19 has affected parents and carers in the screen industries and what they need to keep working.
- Following an extremely challenging year, the Film and TV Charity has relaunched the Looking Glass Survey to get a snapshot of the mental health and wellbeing of people working behind the scenes in film, TV and cinema. Please take it by Monday 28 June.
- As audiences return to cinemas, Oska Bright Film Festival is looking to work with three UK exhibitors to help them become exemplar organisations in welcoming learning disabled audiences. Apply by 30 June.
- BFI FAN has created a new guide to safeguarding for film exhibitors, featuring tips for working with both children & adults, as well as info on how to create code of conduct policies and a safer environment as a film exhibitor.
- Cinema For All has launched its annual Community Exhibitor Survey. If you run a community cinema or film society, this is a great opportunity to have your say. Survey findings contribute to an annual report that helps Cinema For All identify important issues and advocate for the sector.
- Cinema Rediscovered is offering ten aspiring and early career film critics the opportunity to develop their practice at the inaugural online edition of the Film Critic’s workshop, starting in July. Apply by Friday 25 June.
- There are currently roles available at Genesis, Exeter Phoenix, Broadway, Cambridge Film Festival, HOME, Reading Biscuit Factory and more.
- FAN Conversations delivers online discussions with BFI FAN members and industry experts on a range of topics across the exhibition sector. If you missed the first event you can catch up with it here.
- NEXT WAVE is a Berlin-based 9-month intensive professional training programme which researches current trends, facilitates dialogue between film professionals and empowers trainees to rethink the future of cinephilia. Apply by 30 June.
- Open City Documentary Festival and Another Gaze are looking for participants for their first collaborative Critics Workshop, an immersive five-day programme on the ethics and methodologies of feminist film criticism.
- Founded as a yearly moving image festival, DEMO now becomes a permanent curatorial platform exploring the aesthetic and political potentialities of the moving image. Explore its programme here.
- Entries are open for BIFA 2021. Submit your short or feature film now, entries are free until 5 August 2021.
Good reads/watches/listens
- But Where Are You Really From?
- Animus magazine, a new monthly online film magazine
- On the history of anarchist cinema
- A collection of short documentaries exploring notions of home
- On the career of Merle Oberon
- A history of LGBTQ+ representation in film
- The work of Ousmane Sembène in pictures
- On the work of filmmaker Sandra Lahire
- The MUBI podcast
- On the material erasure of women in cinema
- On Black joy in Small Axe
- On avant-garde film preservation
- On Kelly Reichardt’s movie-going memories
- On experimental documentary festival Prismatic Ground
- Cristi Puiu on cinema culture past, present and future
- 90 Minutes or Less podcast on Lynn Shelton
- On the history of the ‘video nasty’ controversy