Enabling festivals to programme new, high-quality work from the UK is at the heart of British Council Film. For some feature films and most shorts, festivals are often the most significant means of reaching an international audience. Similarly, in many countries, festivals are an effective way of enabling large numbers of people to refresh their perceptions of the UK.
We work with international festivals in several ways.
Festival Selector Preview Screenings
The most important of these is to provide a preview service for selectors from the world's major film festivals/markets. This entails maintaining an advanced tracking list of new and imminent UK feature films and staging screening sessions of that work to senior programmers from international Festivals here in London. We currently provide Festival Selector screenings of British feature length films (fiction films or documentaries over 75 minutes in length) to the following international Film Festivals:
- Sundance
- Rotterdam
- Berlin
- Cannes, Official Competition and Un Certain Regard
- Cannes, Directors' Fortnight
- Cannes, Critics' Week
- Karlovy Vary
- Locarno
- Venice
- Toronto
- Busan
- San Sebastian
- Zurich