Worcestershire Film Festival

The Year Of 2012

2012 was a special year, it was the year where we remembered what it was to be proud of being British. The UK put on such an Olympics show that’ll remembered for years and years.

Talking about memorable shows, Worcestershire Film Festival also had a great year. Well, it was our first! We started a year long celebration of film in the county, starting with a cinema exhibition, held at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum. We showcased photographs of all the old cinemas of Worcester and several others. We were also very lucky indeed to be given a projector from the Odeon in Worcester. It was a Victoria Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 - 35mm/70mm Projector that had been in use up until 2011. We had over 5,100 visitors, which we were really pleased with. They left over 400 messages, which have been posted on our site.

Throughout the year, we have been busy recording cinema memories with our intergenerational project, Worcester Cinema Through The Ages. We’ve worked with some fantastic volunteers, young and old who really have worked hard capturing stories and comparing experiences then and now. We are still uploading audio and will be creating a new website for it all. We’re very grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund for their support with this project.

We were thankful to receive a grant from Worcestershire County Council that helped support five Film Roadshow events. This grant allowed us to run events in Worcester, Redditch, Kidderminster, Bromsgrove and Tenbury Wells from May to October. Each one of these events were fantastic opportunities to network with talented film-makers from all over. We showcased 39 films over these events, held some fantastic talks, collected ideas from creators about filming in the Shire and rolled our cinema heritage project out further. Each event was different and we were blessed to be able to base them in great venues such as the Artrix and Regal Cinema.

Racing along to November and our main event, held at The Hive. We were so pleased with our first ever Festival, welcoming nearly 1,100 visitors to our screenings and workshops, many more dropping in to look at our exhibition. What was truly humbling, was the support from the people of Worcester, the shops, the newspaper, radio and city council. We had some fantastic workshops on sound design, funding, motion graphics and much more. The films we showed covered a variety of genres and amazed audiences as these productions had not been seen in public before. We held Q&A sessions after each film and the level of participation was excellent. We finished off with our first award being given to Emily Currie for her wonderful In Dreams animation and some live music.

Since then, all the volunteers have met up, without whom, we couldn’t have done it, and we have discussed what went well and what needed to be improved. We now have a plan for 2013 and we can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Thank you to everyone for your support this year, we hope to wow you next year!