British festivals get huge cash injection
The UK Film Council is awarding British film festivals £740,000 over the next three years, enabling them to raise their profile.
Belfast’s Cinemagic World Screen Film and Television Festival for Young People gets £150,000 enabling it to expand to Scotland, Wales, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and Bristol.
The Bird’s Eye View Film Festival gets £175,000 and expands its focus from London to Glasgow, Manchester and Newcastle.
The Sheffield International Documentary Festival gets £175,000 in order to realize its aim of being Europe’s leading festival for innovation by 2010 while the British Silent Film Festival gets £70,000 to become the UK’s international showcase for pre-1930s world cinema.
The Flatpack Festival receives £70,000 while Deaffest and the London International Animation Festival get £50,000 each.
The Edinburgh International Film Festival had already been allocated £1.88 million earlier.
UKFC CEO John Woodward said, “People love film and festivals give people of all ages and backgrounds the opportunity to immerse themselves in a huge array of exciting and powerful films. This funding will provide a huge step up for these festivals which have major plans to reach out to thousands more people and raise their profile significantly.”
A further £10,000 will be spent to facilitate learning, sharing and initiative building between festivals. The allocation of the remaining £1.88 million from the film festivals pot (international strand) will be announced soon.
Around 80 festivals a year receive public funding from National and Regional Screen Agencies and the UK Film Council, totalling around £900,000. The Film Festival Fund of £1.5 million is additional to this.
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