Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News Applications are now open for Cultural Cinema Exhibition 2025. The twelfth edition of our flagship film programming training course will take place in London between 12-17 January, and the deadline to apply is Friday 15 November. Whether […] The post News & Opportunities: August 2024 Round-Up appeared first on Independent Cinema Office ..read more

Last month, we sent our Marketing Officer Sami Abdul-Razzak to attend Europa Cinemas’ Audience Development and Innovation Lab in Bologna, which took place alongside this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival. In this blog, Sami highlights some of the ideas that have stuck with him since returning home. Europa Cinemas’ Bologna Lab takes place every year […] The post A Week in Bologna: Reflections on Europa Cinemas’ 2024 Innovation Lab appeared first on Independent Cinema Office ..read more

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News We’re looking for a new Marketing Coordinator to join our team! This is a unique opportunity to work on a diverse range of projects and an excellent chance for someone to develop their career in the […] The post News & Opportunities: July 2024 Round-Up appeared first on Independent Cinema Office ..read more

Last month, the ICO’s Duncan Carson and Sami Abdul-Razzak headed to Bologna for this year’s Il Cinema Ritrovato – the Cineteca di Bologna’s annual festival showcasing the latest restorations and rediscoveries from archives and film laboratories around the world. In this blog, they share a few of their highlights. Duncan Carson, Projects and Business Manager Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (dir. Sergei Parajanov, 1965) Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, image courtesy of Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre Watching Kleber Mendonça Filho’s cinephilic paean Pictures of Ghosts (2023) last year, the di ..read more

In this blog, Matchbox Cine’s Sean Welsh explains how they’ve managed to reliably and consistently produce and present optional audio description at their Weird Weekend events, which take place in an ‘emerging’ non-theatrical space. Like most exhibitors[1], we’re keen for our events to be as accessible as possible – hardly anyone is anti-access[2]. As professional access practitioners[3], though, we’re in the unusual position of also having the practical tools to deliver that provision ourselves. We realised very early on that if we could, we should, and we committed that all our own events sh ..read more

In this blog, Yasmin Begum shares her experiences of working as a researcher with Butetown Arts and Culture Association to create an archive of Butetown Carnival and bring this to a diverse local audience. An odd refuge When the Windrush boat docked in Tilbury, communities from places like Cardiff and Liverpool came to greet those onboard. I’ve always been interested in this relationship, and how we represent people of colour and Black people in Wales. The landscape of Wales is different to England in many ways, especially when it comes to film exhibition and film programming. As a Welsh langu ..read more

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News This week we published our 2023-24 Annual Report. The ICO exists so that everyone can experience life-changing cinema, wherever they live and whoever they are. We hope you enjoy reading about how we’ve been working towards that goal over the last year. Thank you to everyone who joined us for ID Screening Days this month, whether in person at Watershed or online. We hope you found the sessions as inspiring and invigorating as we did. Our next event will be Autumn Screening ..read more

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News ID Screening Days is less than a month away! Join us online and at Watershed, Bristol for two days of screenings and sessions aiming to help you show a broader range of films to a broader range of people. We’ve now announced the first sessions for the event — which include discussions on how cinemas can contribute to complex cultural conversations, better cater to neurodiverse audiences, and make their spaces open to everyone — and added a new restoration of David Schicke ..read more

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News Tomorrow, Saturday 27 April, is the 30th anniversary of South African Freedom Day – a date which marks the first non-racialized democratic elections to take place in the country. In celebration of this event, we have worked with Cinema Africa! and Maona Art to bring a 4K restoration of Mapantsula to UK and Irish cinemas. See our website for details of where it’s screening. And if you’d like to screen it in your venue too, we can take bookings until the end of May. A ..read more

Our regular monthly update featuring the latest news and opportunities for your cinema, festival or film society. ICO News 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 sub ..read more