Cinecity 10th Brighton Film Festival

 

 

Welcome to the 10^th edition of CINECITY.

To mark a decade of the festival, we are delighted to present a range of film screenings and special events in more than 10 venues across the city.

Once again CINECITY gives you first sight of highly-anticipated, award-winning titles ahead of release and showcase many others brought to Brighton from around the world for one-off screenings.

Since 2003 CINECITY have presented screenings and special events that have taken place outside of the cinema; from old police cells and hotels, swimming pools and former chapels of rest to coach trips, garden sheds and people’s living rooms. This year we present 3 ‘pop-ups’: The Pavilion, Brighton’s royal pleasure palace becomes a picturehouse for one night only with Stanley Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON screening in the sumptuous music room. We return to The Basement – home to our first ever pop-up cinema in 2005 – for a weekend of new music films and documentaries and The University of Brighton Gallery is transformed into The Artists’ Cinema and Cinema Bookshop.

Taking film out of the cinema reflects a wider trend for the pop-up and site-specific but for us initially, it was also something borne of necessity – the lack of cinema screens devoted to arthouse, foreign language and independent film. Now after 102 years operation as a single screen cinema, the Duke of York’s is expanding with two new screens at Komedia, opening in December. Though this year’s festival comes just too soon to use the new space, this is a very exciting development for cinema-goers in the city.

A love of cinema, cinephilia, involves more than just watching films; it embraces a wider culture of cinema, whether it is reading, writing, discussing or blogging. As a special project for our 10^th edition, we open a pop-up Cinema Bookshop, stocking a wide range of new and used film-books. The space also hosts a display of material relating to a decade of CINECITY.

In the first ever CINECITY back in 2003, we marked the 80^th year of Brighton’s own Jeff Keen, one of the great figures of the British post-war avant-garde. This Winter, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery devotes a major exhibition, SHOOT THE WRX, to the “Peckinpah of the South Downs”.

With the Jeff Keen retrospective, a decade of CINECITY to look back on and the imminent new cinema screens, there is a sense of the past, present and future co-mingling throughout this year’s programme. CINECITY have always championed the directorial debut and this year we present around twenty first features. Our emphasis on debuts highlights cinema’s constant re-invention and the importance of new beginnings: the future of cinema continues to burn brightly.