Cheltenham International Film Festival

15-24 September 2023

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Submit Your Film for CIFF 2023

The film festival, celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, is founded on promoting films by emerging filmmakers and paying tribute to celebrated filmmakers and actors. In 2020, the Festival introduced films ‘IN COMPETITION’ to draw attention to new voices in film, to raise audience interest in their films, and to offer filmmakers an opportunity to use IN COMPETITION and BEST FILM in their promotional material.

Incoming Chair of BAFTA, Sara Putt, will lead the BEST FILM competition jury at Cheltenham International Film Festival 2023. BEST FILM is open only to directors with one or two films on their C.V. Joining Sara on the panel, among others, are: Tom Berkeley, director of An Irish Goodbye which scored a double earlier this year, winning BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT at the Oscars (2023) and a BAFTA for BEST BRITISH SHORT FILM (2023), and Jonathan Dean, senior writer at Sunday Times Culture magazine.

BEST FILM in 2021 was the Polish film, I NEVER CRY (Piotr Domalewski) and in 2022, the Swiss Ukrainian film, OLGA (Elie Grappe), took home the honours.

We welcome feature films, narrative and documentary, as well as film shorts from emerging filmmakers. All films are watched by a selection panel which numbered up to 20 people in 2022. Films selected for the festival will allow filmmakers access to new audiences in a town that has been home to arts festivals through the decades and home to many celebrities. Films will also have the opportunity to be screened online via YourScreen.

The Jury

Sara Putt – Incoming Chair of BAFTA

Tom Berkeley – director of An Irish Goodbye which scored a double earlier this year, winning BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT at the Oscars (2023) and a BAFTA for BEST BRITISH SHORT FILM (2023).

Jonathan Dean, senior writer at Sunday Times Culture magazine

Festival Strands

New and Old

The Festival plans to introduce a number of new strands in 2023 including “25, 50, 100” to mark the anniversaries of film classics. 25,50,100 will be packaged into events to include high profile guests, talks, music and more. For example, we plan to organise live music to be performed as a soundtrack during the 100 year anniversary of Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim.

Country Focus

COUNTRY FOCUS has proved popular and in 2023 our Country Focus is Spain. We plan to feature the work of emerging and celebrated Spanish filmmakers to show-off the country’s best, and to complement our Spanish theme with cultural events.

Events

Discussions are also taking place with the prestigious Cheltenham Jazz Festival about linking jazz with film and film with Jazz during the Jazz Festival at the end of April as well as during the film festival in September.

And we partnering with Cheltenham Education Partnership, the British Film Institute and we are in talks with BAFTA to organise activities under the umbrella brand CineYouth – a year-round programme to engage with young people who have expressed an interest in film as a career.

We are also considering introducing television given the excellent drama now screened and streamed by audiences worldwide.