News & March 2024 Round-Up

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society.

• We’re hiring! We’re looking for a Senior Manager to join our Film Hub South East team. They will have overall responsibility for all Film Hub South East activity including BFI NETWORK, Film Academy Plus, and our Young Film Network. Full details and apply.
• Thanks to everyone who joined us for this year’s Spring Screening Days – whether online or in person at BFI Southbank. We’ll be announcing details of the next Screening Days events very soon, so make sure that you’re subscribed to our mailing list if you want to stay up to date!
• We were proud to announce the second round of beneficiaries of our Miles Ketley Memorial Fund this month. Set up in 2022 in memory of the producer and trustee of the ICO, the fund provides bursaries to emerging filmmakers to help further their careers. See the list of this year’s recipients.
• 27 April 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of Freedom Day, when the first non-racialised democratic elections took place in South Africa. In celebration of this milestone, we’ve partnered with Cinema Africa! and Maona Art to bring a 4K restoration of Mapantsula to UK cinemas. Last week, Mosa Mpetha of Cinema Africa! wrote on our blog about their aims for the release, the journey to get to this point, and their vision of making Black and African stories more regularly seen on the big screen.
• This month, we partnered with Conic and 104films to present a roundtable conversation on The Cinema of Ideas with filmmakers Ella Glendining, Jessi Gutch, Justin Edgar and Ted Evans. Hosted by film and culture writer Lillian Crawford, the discussion touched on the participants’ experiences as disabled and deaf people forging a career in the film industry, the barriers that still persist, and what needs to happen next. You can catch up with the recording on our YouTube channel.
• Several members of the ICO team were in Berlin last month for this year’s Berlinale. On our blog they highlighted a few of the films that they’re most excited to see reach UK audiences over the coming year, including new work by Mati Diop, Levan Akin and Jane Schoenbrun.

• Save the date! The BFI Film Audience Network conference, BFI FAN CON, will take place at Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast, from 11–13 September 2024. This conference is for FAN members across the UK to meet, celebrate the work they do, share their experiences, and consider new approaches to wider industry issues. Ahead of the event, BFI FAN would like to find out what an ideal conference would look like for attendees. Please share your thoughts here.
• BFI Film Academy has launched an open call for industry partners to deliver Short and Specialist Courses in 2024-25 that provide opportunities for young people to develop new skills and build a career in the screen industries. Applications are open until 3 May.
• Check out Julie’s Bicycle’s BFI Sustainable Screen Resource Hub, a new, free environmental sustainability resource for all organisations working in the screen sector, but particularly exhibitors, screen archives, education, skills, training and research organisations, and sector support and promotion bodies.
• Launched in 2023, the Documentary Film Council (DFC) is a democratic umbrella organisation designed to represent UK independent documentary film. Nominations for the eight board positions on their first-ever elected Board of Directors are now open, with the deadline for self-nomination being 14 April.
• An intensive one-week programme that brings together arthouse exhibition professionals from across the world, applications are now open for CICAE’s Arthouse Cinema Training, returning to Berlin this summer and running from 19-25 August 2024.
• The Electric Cinema (the UK’s oldest working cinema), closed on 29 February 2024 due to development proposals intended to destroy a significant section of Birmingham’s Station Street and replace it with a 50-floor tower. A campaign has now been set up to call on the city’s leaders to protect the area’s historically significant buildings and cultural heritage.
• Discovery Film Festival is Scotland’s International Film Festival for Young Audiences. Based at and managed by Dundee Contemporary Arts, the festival brings together the very best films from around the world for audiences aged 3+. The popular short films strand packages,  Shorts for Wee Ones (age 3+) and Shorts for Middle Ones (age 8+) are available to cinemas, arts venues, film clubs and societies, and offer an excellent way to engage family audiences. For further information and to make a booking, please email amaya.marco@dca.org.uk
• T A P E is looking for a designer/illustrator/artist to create branding and assets for SNAPSHOT: a season of four feature films and a short film programme celebrating Black girlhood. The deadline to apply is today, 28 March.
• If you couldn’t make it to this year’s Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, they’ve made the New Cinema Awards Showcase available online until 31 March. This selection of shorts and features comprises some of the most distinctive new works in cinema, and each found a premiere at the Festival earlier this month.
• A reminder that Watershed is hosting a sprint meeting on 25 April to provide exhibitors with information about the upcoming UK-wide BFI FAN season: Art of Action.
• There are currently roles available at Cinema for All, Rocket Science, Film London, Kings Cinema, Leeds Film and more.

• Remembering Contemporary Films’ Kitty Cooper
• In conversation with June Givanni, recipient of the BAFTA for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema
• Young film workers shine spotlight on Scotland’s ‘invisible women’
• In the Loop: On the films of Wojciech Has
• What might a more inclusive film programming world look like?
• Art house films are having their TikTok moment
• The birds still sing at Auschwitz: on Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest
• In conversation: Huey Copeland and Garrett Bradley
• The Watermill: On life outside the National Portfolio
• Lina Soualem on her new documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias
• In conversation with sound designer Johnnie Burn
• Rarefilmm Against the World: One website’s quest to preserve forgotten cinema
• The oral history of Cinema Scope, Canada’s gift to global cinephiles
• Remembering David Bordwell
• Aboubakar Sanogo on the films of Med Hondo (podcast)
• Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham on No Other Land
• Becoming Hou Hsiao-hsien
• Mr. Tsai Goes to Washington: On Tsai Ming-liang’s Walker Series
• A brief history of the political assassin on film
• The 100 fights that shaped action cinema
• Decaying digital movie and TV show files are a Hollywood crisis
• Visions of liberation in Haitian cinema
• The making of the genocidal mind
• Care, Exile, and Freedom: A Conversation with Gelare Khoshgozaran
• Cinema is the stalker: Stanley Schtinter and Chris Petit on Last Movies
• Why is it There: David Kiehn on the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

Header image: an ICO tote at Spring Screening Days

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