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About our Film Festivals

Murray Edwards College has a strong interest in the visual arts, and is home to the New Hall Art Collection, a collection of works by leading women artists unrivalled in the UK or Europe. Its film festivals, initiated in 1998, represent the continuing evolution of the College's aim of creating platforms, building audiences, and encouraging public participation in the arts, from painting to film, from still to moving image.

The cinema is the most exciting art form to have emerged in the 20th century. It is therefore only proper that Murray Edwards College should keep its artistic ethos alive by opening its doors to the creative potential of a cinema determined to work outside mainstream forms. The best of cinema, from across all genres, gives both aficionados and new recruits the freedom to experiment with images that encourage us to see the world afresh.

Our festivals' main objectives are:

• To challenge the hegemonic and ethnocentric world-view reproduced through contemporary mainstream media and cinema, by acquainting audiences with cinematic works from other countries in a more systematic manner
• To enable visitors to view some of the most exciting works from independent filmmakers from all over the world, especially films that have not yet been screened in the UK and will not probably make it to the UK commercial circuit
• To allow a more inquisitive reflection upon current themes by revisiting them through the lens of film, taken in its extraordinary diversity: short films and feature-length, fiction, animation, documentary and experimental works
• To organise debates that mobilise the public around a set of films providing a unique framework for reassessing topics of special relevance to contemporary societies (e.g., class, gender, race, sexuality, identity, memory, politics).