This spring, the Flatpack Film Festival will return to Birmingham for its 11th year. For years, the festival has been attracting people from far and wide for its “magnificently eclectic” films, performances and installations. Overtaking venues all across Birmingham. The festival embraces animation, documentary, ground-breaking shorts, and really, any kind of film you could think of.

A crucial event for LGBT communities, the BFI Flare Film Festival returns this year with a plethora of groundbreaking and captivating works from a diverse multitude of filmmakers from across the globe. The BFI’s annual showcase of LGBT cinema, Flare has encouraged fresh stories, different approaches and new filmmakers for over 30 years.

Anna Biller is a filmmaker whose work focuses on the “lived day-to-day experience of the female,” using the styles and modes of classic cinema to address female roles within culture, “coding feminist ideas within cinematic aesthetics and visual pleasure.” Though her work appropriates, quotes and reinterprets existing conventions, it remains entirely unique. “”Proper” art films masquerading as popular films.”

Currently screening in over 20 cities around the world, Human Rights Watch selects approximately 40 films to be shown worldwide for its Film Festival. 16 of those 40 will screen at the London HRW Film Festival this year. Dedicated to defending and protecting human rights,  these films all highlight the importance of tolerance and change, bringing to light matters of great importance, as well as demonstrating artistic quality.

Our annual round-up of the best romantic projects in town.

To read complete pitches and to contact any of the writers, please email Andy.

Now in it’s 10th year, Film London’s Microwave scheme commissions two £100k budgeted features each year. We spoke with two SP members with projects selected for the scheme. The first was with director Ryan Vernava, and below is our second, with writer and director Alex Winckler.

Alex is involved in Microwave with two producers, Maria Forsstrom and Jude Goldstrei. Their film, Smalltown Boy is “a rite of passage story about a different type of skinhead.”

Now in it’s 10th year, Film London’s Microwave scheme commissions two £100k budgeted features each year. Before this though, 12 participating project teams are selected, given extensive development support, mentoring and training; and then, in a way, pitted against each other as they pitch their projects along several phases of the shortlisting process, until the final two are selected. Though, on the surface, this might seems a little like an independent film version of The Apprentice, in reality it’s not quite so mercenary. The development programme, Microschool, that all those shortlisted go through together helps the filmmaking teams to hone their scripts, stories and skills, meet key individuals and forge lasting relationships.

We spoke with two SP members who have been involved in the shortlisting process about their experiences. The first is with director Ryan Vernava.

In January, documentary vanguard and equality champion Alma Har’el joined us for the first Film of the Month competition of the new year. Read about her career here, including her wonderful two hybrid doc features, her music video work and her time spent establishing gender bias advocacy group Free The Bid. Her poetic words on this month’s three short films in the competition that received the most number of member votes, below.