A Film Lover’s Guide to Manchester: Festivals
By Tobias Soar and Josh Sandy
It seems like every week there’s a different festival happening in Manchester. Food, music, art, we have it all up north. Here’s a selection of our favourite Mancunian film festivals:
As the city’s literal home of arts and culture, HOME has a huge selection of film seasons to look forward to during the year. In fact, their Not Just Bollywood season, a celebration of contemporary Indian culture, has already begun and is running until 2nd October. They are also still in the midst of their year-long Celebrating Women in Global Cinema season which still has plenty of exciting events and screenings to look out for. Not to mention their yearly Halloween event FilmFear, which this year features a Halloween night preview of The Shining’s upcoming sequel Doctor Sleep. Keep an eye on their website for details of all their upcoming seasons throughout the year.
— Josh
Horror and sci-fi lovers, unite! Grimmfest is THE festival for fear fanatics. Their lineup always contains a number of indie horror films that lovers of the genre will be itching to see. At Grimmfest 2018 I got to see Summer of 84, which unfortunately wasn’t released in UK cinemas, but, fortunately, was shown at Grimmfest! Grimmfest celebrates its 11th edition from 3 October to 9 October and boasts an admirable range of films directed by women, such as Pollyanna McIntosh’s Darlin’, Rabid by the Soska Sisters, and Audrey Cummings’ She Never Died.
— Tobias
Now in its fifth year, the Manchester Animation Festival has rapidly become the UK’s largest animation festival and is once again running at HOME from 10-14th November. During the festival’s packed 5-day programme, you can expect animated short competitions, feature films, retrospective screenings, panel discussions, networking events, and much more. Whether your passion is stop-motion, cel or CGI animation, there is guaranteed to be something for everyone and its variety of genres makes it the perfect first film festival for any students looking to get into cinema.
— Josh
Returning in 2020, the 16th edition of Kinofilm – Manchester International Short Film Festival is running between 26th February and 1st March and looks set to be another sensational celebration of short films from all over the globe. During the 5-day programme, festival-goers have the opportunity to attend an enormous variety of short film series arranged by both genre and the origin of the filmmakers. Given that highlights of 2018’s festival included a retrospective of Slovakian animation, a tribute to Pan European short films and an entire day dedicated to Iranian cinema, Kinofilm is a must for any foreign cinema fan.
— Josh
Manchester Film Festival (MANIFF)
A yearly festival occurring in March, MANIFF boasts a wide selection of narrative features, documentaries, short films, and VR films. MANIFF 2019 had an early screening of Hotel Mumbai, months before its wide release. It also had screenings of films that might never see the light of day, such as DTF. MANIFF used to run over a weekend in March, now it happens over a whole week. This massive scheduling change allows the festival to screen multiple films a day.
— Tobias