Forget Cannes and Sundance, the Beeston Film Festival returns this month right on your doorstep! Featuring a huge range of work from international and local filmmakers, we spoke to festival director, John Currie, to hear all about the ethos behind this annual event and find out what attendees and filmmakers can expect from this year's festival.
“The film industry is something that can feel a bit distant,” John Currie tells me. “We’re typically consumers of the film industry, but I wanted the community to go beyond that and get a bit more involved.” If you wanted to boil down and brew the essence of Beeston’s Film Festival, that sentence wouldn’t be a bad start. The short film festival is all about the fun of watching and making films being accessible to the community - now, naturally, that community is Beestonians, but John was eager to remind us, “All you have to do is get the tram and you’re there, there’s Beeston, there’s The Arc!”
John created the festival in 2014 because, as he described in a NottsTV interview, he “saw a gap in the market”. At that time in Beeston, there wasn’t a cinema, let alone a film festival. Fast forward to over ten years later, Beeston boasts the Arc Cinema and a well-established film festival - that ‘gap in the market’ seems to have been well and truly filled. More than having simply plugged a hole though, the festival fosters a real community spirit and encourages a good old-fashioned enjoyment of films.
Something that struck me when speaking to John is his liveliness and the sense that there is a playfulness to the festival. “We’re not a high-brow film festival, and I’m not being critical of that. We don’t try and pretend that we’re going to have some deep and profound conversations about the role of film in society,” he explains. This sense of fun is played out in the award ceremonies at the end of each festival, The B’Oscars. Audience members and filmmakers alike get dressed up, enjoy a bit of fizz, and walk down the red carpet to see which of the films shown will receive an accolade.
Often the media is divisive, but if you go to any short film festival, you get a sense of our shared humanity. It’s full of compassion, full of empathy, and yes diversity. We’re very proud of that fact
“I’m going to encourage everyone to dress up excessively and to celebrate the filmmakers by having a bit of fun”, promises John.
Of course a little of the B’Oscars is tongue-in-cheek, but there’s also a genuine sense of celebration and, by making a night of it for everyone, they lift up those special films that do stand out. This is part of a marked sincerity in how the festival honours filmmakers who want to showcase their work at the festival.
Another element of this is the venue. In its infancy, the festival took place in a well-loved Beeston pub, the White Lion, but when the Arc Cinema opened in 2021, the festival soon moved in. Moving to the Arc helped them to “elevate the experience” for filmmakers, something the festival aims for each year. “We’re committed to projecting the films as best we can. We started with a very basic system, and now we’ve got 4K surround sound and leather reclining seats,” John chuckles, proud of the Arc’s professional set-up.
The plush screening at the Arc isn’t all though, all filmmakers who submit their work to the festival go through the review process, which totals a dizzying number of screen hours. “We review their films properly. This year we had thousands of films submitted and the team did 3749 reviews.” John previously posted on their social media that, “Many hours have been spent deliberating on the final selection. No AI system could ever harness the humanity this team brings to the table. The answers from the selection team are not some derived, homogenous output from a soulless algorithm, instead, it's the judgment of many genuine film fans.”
There is a clear emphasis on authentic process, which applies both for the filmmakers who submit their films, but also the selection team who are, as John says, “Beestonians, and a few honorary Beestonians, who decide what is going to be the best for the Beeston public.”
As well as their selection team, the festival has an international jury made up of experts from the industry who will determine which films should win. The jury members are a true representation of the international community coming from Belgium, France, Greece, Germany, Iran, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Ethiopia. In a political climate which seems to pit us against each other, I was interested in what John thought was important in continuing to create an international community: “Often the media is divisive, but if you go to any short film festival, you get a sense of our shared humanity. It’s full of compassion, full of empathy, and yes diversity. We’re very proud of that fact.”
Not only is the jury international, but the films are too as they come from filmmakers across the world. There are also different categories such as ‘African Voices’, ‘Women’s Voices’, ‘Pride’, and ‘East Midlands Focus’.
“Film festivals can often focus on genre. I’ve always loved the idea of being able to say let’s enjoy the full panoply of drama, comedy, non-fiction,” John describes. By placing films into some of these categories, different genres and styles can be grouped together which allows an audience to see the films’ shared similarities rather than just their differences. By extension, allowing the audience to see, in John’s words, “Our common sense of shared humanity, how we cry, how we love, how we worry about the world, how we worry about each other.”
John does not shy away from politics either, explaining that their team discussed whether they should accept films from Russia and Israel. They ultimately decided that it was important to “be open to assessing films from any country” because “filmmakers don’t drop bombs”. But they keep the ethos close at hand that, if anything “worked against their values as a team”, or if it “supported genocide or ethnic-cleansing” then it would be immediately disallowed.
Beeston Film Festival seems to find that careful balance of both enjoying the playfulness and joy of cinema whilst being committed to exploring important messages. It creates a strong bond with the international film community whilst refusing to forget the community it has at home just a tram-ride away.
The Beeston Film Festival takes place between 24-27 April at The Arc Cinema in Beeston. Head to their website to see the full programme of films being shown.
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