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From screen to text – enhancing moving image culture for wider audiences, through language transfer and accessible subtitles for film and visual arts

Court_postcard_cropped Specialist distribution with a curatorial angle – creating a platform for singular and distinctive independent films, taking them to wide and diverse audiences

Celebrating the best in contemporary and historical moving image from around the world, with a particular focus on under-represented and under-acknowledged areas of cinema

Due to the disruption caused by COVID-19, our film distribution and festival activities are currently suspended. We are working towards presenting Aperture 2020 online early in the autumn alongside the first part of our forthcoming Japanese project “Urban, Natural, Human”.

Please sign up to our mailing list and follow us on social media to keep informed. In the meantime you can watch some of our titles online – see below.

Orders from our shop will be fulfilled as soon as we are able to, but with some unavoidable delays – please bear with us.

Our subtitling and access work continues as usual.

Keep well and stay safe!

Survey on the Impact of UK Government Covid-19 Financial Support on the Creative & Media Industries

As a small limited company in the creative industries left out of UK Government Covid-19 support, our Founder, Sonali Joshi, has been actively involved in lobbying and raising awareness for those left out, and is one of the three founders of newly formed NGO ExcludedUK. As part of of these initiatives, we are currently conducting survey to help us paint as broad a picture as possible of all those excluded, which ExcludedUK estimates at around 3 million individuals and businesses. This will feed into evidence we are submitting to the DCMS Committee’s current call for evidence. And further to being invited to participate in a roundtable organised by the Labour Party with Keir Starmer, Anneliese Dodds and Ed Miliband, Sonali will be feeding into further discussions with Labour’s Business team with further evidence.

We’d be really grateful for any who’ve been affected to complete this short 10 minute survey. Many thanks.

Day for Night Statement on COVID-19

Much of our work early this year has been focused on bringing together our Japan project, “Urban, Natural, Human”, ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, and as such, Day for Night’s two directors Sonali and Chonpel have been in Japan since early February. While no formal lockdown came into effect until the state of emergency in various Japanese urban centres this week, disruption to daily life was abundantly apparent as soon as they arrived back in Tokyo. Colleagues were talking about audiences’ extreme reluctance to venture into film theatres and cinemas were already voluntarily closing. It was clear that this was a sign of more to come.

With the Tokyo Olympics now postponed until 2021, the Day for Night team is reshaping this project, what was to be our main focus this year. While lockdowns are inevitably disrupting everyone’s daily lives in ways we could never have imagined pre-COVID-19, we must all adapt accordingly, with safety at the forefront of our thinking and actions.

The next few months will be extremely challenging for Day for Night, as we know it will be for many others. There are many who have been left out of government support, including small businesses like us. We are doing our bit to lobby government, industry bodies and the press, and are supporting this petition. Feel free to share.

At Day for Night, our work is inherently all about risk-taking and pushing boundaries, and we are resolved to continuing our commitment to support underrepresented cinema and increasing opportunities for audiences to engage in more diverse visual culture. We equally continue our commitments to supporting D/deaf and hard of hearing and blind and visually impaired communities through our work in access and inclusive cinema, alongside BAME and other underrepresented talent and audiences, and wider audiences for independent world cinema.

We thank all our partners, collaborators, our freelance contributors and our audiences for your support at this time, and our thoughts are equally with all of you.

We’re confident that the film and creative industries will thrive again, and that we’ll be able to welcome audiences back to live events and the collective viewing experience in one way or another, once we reach the other side. We remain committed to supporting filmmakers and producers and the cinemas with whom we work and we hope we’ll be able to continue our collaborations again sooner rather than later, and we look forward to bringing more diverse cinema and moving image culture to you soon.

In the meantime, keep well and stay safe!

You can support our work right now in the following ways:

* sign up for our newsletter and follow us on social media, so you can share in our work when we’re able to present screenings and live events again

* in store: visit our online shop – more of our titles to come in the near future

* online: watch our titles online – see below

* support your local cinema. A big shout out to all the cinemas we love and work with, in particular those we work with regularly:

– Day for Night team members’ local cinemas:

TYNESIDE CINEMA

FILMHOUSE (Edinburgh)

RIO (London)

– other cinemas with which we work regularly:

GLASGOW FILM THEATRE

HOME (Manchester)

ICA (London)

LEXI CINEMA (London)

REGENT STREET CINEMA (London)

SHOWROOM (Sheffield)

WATERSHED (Bristol)

There are many more independent cinemas across the UK and beyond doing fantastic work, so please do support them in any ways you can.

ONLINE

BALLOON – Cheltenham International Film Festival

Watch online: 14-16 June

Shot in a distinctive cold colour palette and featuring delicate, handheld camerawork, Balloon combines documentary realism with heightened formal artistry in its study of three generations of a Tibetan sheep herding family in the 1980s. Dargye and Drolkar’s two boisterous youngest sons have blown up their parents’ condoms like balloons. Not only does this outrage their entire village, but more practically: they have no more condoms. The couple already have three sons, and as China has recently introduced its one-child policy, they can’t have any more. Pema Tseden brilliantly exposes how the personal is political in his examination of the often profoundly traumatic consequences of China’s former birth control regulations. Modernity and tradition co-exist as the family attempts to reconcile the competing demands of state regulation, free will, religious expectation and filial obligation. Tseden deftly balances his challenging subject matter with moments of gentle humour and deep lyricism.

Sfera 1932 Award – Special Mention, Venice Film Festival 2019

Silver Hugo – Best Screenplay, Chicago International Film Festival 2019

Best Film – New Asian Cinema award, Five Flavours Asian Film Festival 2019

Grand Prize, Tokyo FILMeX 2019