It’s been a year of change and some exciting developments as we have taken on a new talent remit, supporting emerging filmmaking talent in the region with BFI Talent Executive for the South West, Alice Cabañas joining our team. Alice has been working with exhibitors and festivals across the South West, such as Cornwall Film Festival, Exeter Phoenix’s Two Shorts Nights Festival, Encounters and more to offer workshops, panel discussions, talks, Director Q&As and networking events, providing much needed support and bringing together emerging directors, producers and writers in the South West to initiate short film collaborations.

Film Hub South West has also taken over the support for regional film festivals from the BFI this year and have expanded our annual open call for audience development activity. We have been proud to support a range of events in 2018 from supporting Purbeck, Bath and Cornwall film festivals to target young and rurally isolated audiences to helping C-Fylm to work with young people to create and screen Cornish Tommies alongside archive films at cinemas and village halls across Cornwall. Find out more about the projects we have supported here.

Through our rolling pitch pot we have been able to support over 25 organisations in the South West to extend their audience development plans to reach new cinema audiences, through targeted marketing or bespoke additional activity. Projects have ranged from engaging a young programmer at Bridport Arts Centre to screening archive films in the woods with Compass Presents Arcadia to marketing for Battleships of the silent era at Portsmouth’s No.6 Cinema to screening deaf shorts with Fleet Films.  Check out some of the projects here.

As well as supporting member organisations through our rolling Pitch Pot we’ve opened up our support to work with individuals this year through Beyond Boundaries.  So far we have helped Lorena Pino to work with Town Hall Arts in Trowbridge on Getting Together Through Films and African Voices Forum’s Sauda Kyalambuka to screen Queen of Katwe at the Malcolm X Centre. We also supported Linda Devo to screen Tangerine at The Brunswick club with Kiki. We are looking  forward to continuing this exciting work in 2019.

We have now opened our Audience Development Open Call for 2019 and you can find  out about all the support strands we currently offer from professional development to support for activity on our website here.

To see what films our members have loved in 2018 you can check our their top 19 films of the year here.