Screams By The Sea’s Radi Nikolov talks about the network and screening opportunities at Bath Film Festival.

Going to festivals, events, meet-ups, networking opportunities, gatherings, and screenings is a big part of my daily life these days. As a newly established film festival, but also as a filmmaker, I try to approach all of those events with the responsibility they deserve. Hearing that Film Hub South West had the chance to support me with a small bursary for travel and get to one of those events in the region, I had to take it and go to the Bath Film Festival!

Visiting other film festivals and exchanging ideas is always something that I find useful. Having the opportunity to speak with festival director Jasmine Barker and hear her talk about the great success their festival has seen was inspirational to us here at Screams By The Sea. Hearing their approach towards engaging different venues within the community, as well as their use of printed physical media to reach local established groups gave us lots of ideas. Sometimes you forget that we indeed live in a real world, with real, physical media all around us and not just on spreadsheets and social media reports!

Programming inspiration

Our visit to the Industry Day at Bath Film Festival began with a talk, masterfully delivered by Holly Tarquini, on F-Rating. A film rating measuring female-led stories in programming. The conversation was fantastically sombre, given the flawed systems we’ve lived in for so long but Tarquini said something that must be heard by everyone: “I can’t smash the patriarchy, but I can try to be a little better tomorrow.”

Sometimes you might feel the lack of power we all have but when you think about it, it all starts with the small personal changes. That inspired us to take a look at our past programming as well as to keep our eyes open for the future of our festival, making sure that audiences, as well as filmmakers, know that we’re a safe space that promotes diversity in voices and wants to hear from everyone. We’ll absolutely adopt the F-Rating as an idea moving forward in our printed and digital programs.

The day continued with fantastic opportunities to network with people within the area and exchange contacts. I even managed to have a quick conversation about the Early Development Opportunities that the BFI is working on at the moment. As a writer that is working on a few different feature length scripts right now, it was useful to hear about the ways I can benefit from support in the development stages of my writing. But the highlights I think, and I wish we had more time to truly dive into it, were two conversations that happened one after the other: the Film Hub members meet-up and MUBI and Disney presenting their current exhibition plans. Both of those conversations touched on a subject matter that I believe we all must talk more about: What is the future of cinema?

Hub members have many different experiences with similar titles but across the board, attendance is low. However MUBI is trying out something that really piqued our interest here at Screams By The Sea – a hybrid model, where by buying a subscription to their platform, you also receive four cinema tickets for the ‘MUBI Film of the Week’ (in selected cinemas). This model, where you have the new titles at home, but also have the chance to partake of community screenings in local cinema feels right. It feels like something that could have legs, and we’re sure to be keeping our eyes on how MUBI develops this idea in the future.

And just like that our time at the Bath Film Festival was over. The Film Hub South West’s support to be able to take the time and be part of these discussions was an incredible help. We’re now filled with new ideas and can’t wait to bring those ideas down to our neck of the woods. Thank you for the support and thank you to Bath Film Festival for always delivering on that fantastic quality programming.

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