It was an important day for us on Friday (3 March), as we were privileged to welcome the UK Ambassador to UNESCO and representatives from the UK National Commission for UNESCO, Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office and HM Treasury to Bristol, to find out more first hand about work taking place under the city’s different UNESCO accolades.

Film fans in and around Bristol are about to get their first chance to see the feel-good feature from the land of Gross National Happiness – Bhutan – that’s both an Oscars® history-maker and a triumph of climate-friendly filmmaking.

How does it feel when your feature film debut gets worldwide distribution? We caught up with Bristol horror writer/director Ben Steiner to find out. His first feature, Matriarch, gained an international release on Hulu and Disney+ in October 2022. Its world premiere opened Screamfest 2022 in LA and it also picked up the Gold Audience Award at Sheffield’s Celluloid Screams Festival. 

Our first four year report has now been ratified by UNESCO, and we’re proud to share it with our partners and supporters.

The first ever Bristol and Bath Screen Summit, showcasing the city region as a leading global production community, took place in Bristol on 2 and 3 November.

The Bottle Yard Studios marked the official opening of TBY2, its new premium facility last night, at an event that brought together leading UK film and High-End TV producers, local crew and companies and regional and national partners and supporters of the Bristol studios’ expansion.

BFI NETWORK South West has announced the 10 participants of the inaugural Shorts2Features career-development scheme.

5 Bristol writers have joined a Channel 4 scheme designed to nurture TV drama writers in the West and South West of England – and take up the chance to submit a script to the broadcaster’s drama commissioning editor.

Award winning production company Sid Gentle Films today announced a new development and production arm, Sid Wild, based in Bristol.

Annual figures released today by Bristol Film Office show that film and TV production in the city generated an estimated £20.8 million in 2021-22, a 22% increase on pre-pandemic figures and the largest contribution that filming-related activity has made towards Bristol’s economy in a decade.

It was our pleasure to welcome Potsdam UNESCO City of Film Focal Point Lisa Nawrocki, to Bristol this week.

Last week saw the welcome return to an in-person UCCN Annual Conference (18-24 July) after the global disruption of the pandemic. The 2022 edition took place in the host city of Santos – our fellow City of Film – and we caught up with our UNESCO City of Film Manager Natalie Moore, who was there to fly the flag for Bristol.