Cambridge Film Festival celebrates film past, present and future, showcases new talent and brings film makers to the city for eight glorious days of screenings and events from 25 October to 1 November.
I met with Kayleigh Barnes, Marketing Co-ordinator at Cambridge Film Trust to find out more about this year’s Festival schedule. Every year (in what sounds to me like a really fabulous job!) the Festival programmers visit major international film festivals – think London, Cannes, Berlin and Venice. Their quest is to discover the best new films and documentaries out there and to bring a varied line up back to Cambridge, giving us a rare chance to see great films that we might otherwise miss.
Kayleigh and I talked about the diverse strands of programming that run alongside the main feature films and documentaries. The Family Film Festival offers daytime film screenings suitable for all ages, with linked children’s arts and crafts activities and a BAFTA workshop while the Short Film programme brings us shorts from around the world. For a film maker, having your work shown in this category is very prestigious indeed; in a lengthy selection process, hundreds of submissions are reviewed by a panel of film industry experts and each film is watched by three reviewers before a final forty films make the cut.
For fans of old movies, there’s a Silence and Sounds classics programme, screening vintage silent film with live musical accompaniment. Experimental film making is showcased in the Microcinema programme while the very popular Camera Catalonia screens a selection of the best Catalan films. Partnerships with the Cambridge African Film Festival and the Korean Cultural Centre enrich the Festival programme with contemporary films from across Africa and Korea.
Cambridge Film Trust, a charity founded to promote film culture and education in the East of England, runs this event under the leadership of Festival Director, Toby Jones. The Festival’s main venue is the Arts Picturehouse Cinema in St Andrew’s Street with screenings also being held at Emmanuel College just opposite and The Light Cinema at Cambridge Leisure Park.
Check out the Festival website where you’ll find the full programme of screenings and events and through which you can book tickets.
www.cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk
This post is part of my October “New in Cambridge” column in Velvet magazine. Read more on http://www.velvetmag.co.uk
New in Cambridge 