After a great success in 2011, Northern Nights Film Festival is making a return.
This year the event will run over four days in September, giving up to 300 UK producers, directors, actors, composers, sound recordists, cinematographers, writers, sales agents, distributors – as well as broadcasting and funding representatives – the opportunity to meet and start or further develop their film projects.
Filmmakers from around the UK seeking exposure and/or co-production partners can submit projects; Northern Nights is looking for all kinds of films – of any genre or style, up to 40mins in length. Early in August, the Northern Nights Team will announce the top 12 films that have made the catalogue, which will be featured on their website for the remainder of the year, as well as being toured across the UK and abroad, and showed at numerous pop-up events over the course of the year. Of the remaining submissions, a further six films will be selected via online voting, giving anyone who submitted a film a chance to get their following to support them. Anyone can vote, they just need to register. Voting starts on August 12 and ends on August 19. The final Catalogue of 18 films is announced the next day.
The festival will run from September 3rd-5th 2012: three days of screenings intertwined with workshops and networking activities in the immersive Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, where you can eat special popcorn and vote for your favourite film out of the ones you see. These three days will lead to the culmination on the Gala Night on September 8th – a special event in a lavish setting in Leicester square which will feature the ceremony, awarding the Grand Prize by our judging panel (TBA).
Networking meetings will represent a new and interesting feature this year. Networking means having a real possibility to encounter members of the participating teams in a 30-minute individual meeting at the festival. Registered users looking forward to the Festival merriments will be asked to give their preference on who they would like to meet. Northern Nights team will organise these introductions to try and make ‘perfect matches’ amongst potential collaborators. Upon arrival at the festival, each participant will receive his own customised meeting schedule, set up by us according to the availability of the participants. Additional one-on-one meetings can be requested. These meetings are not centred around single projects, but offer room for structural exchange, for example to discuss business ideas, company strategies and potential common grounds for potential collaborations.
Northern Nights is set to be much more than just another festival screening, the organisers feel committed first and formost to making it a valuable networking event, certainly Gorilla will be attending, so perhaps we will see you there and we can chat over a frappuccino or whatever it is the hip London filmmakers drink these days – we’ll stick to the whiskey.
