The UK’s leading short film and animation festival Encounters returns to the Watershed Bristol in late September for it’s 22nd edition, serving as a platform for both emerging and established animators and filmmakers who’ve produced work in the short form.

We find repetition. We find repetition is comforting. We find repetition is comforting and creates stability. We find repetition is comforting and creates stability through the construction of patterns. We find repetition is comforting and creates stability through the construction of patterns, patterns that are essential to our comprehension of existence.

Briony Hanson has been the Director of Film for the British Council since 2011, and is responsible for overseeing promotion of British films and filmmakers across the world.

It’s over a year since our festival debut and I’m still clocking up the air miles. I’m not alone. I thought my own existence precarious, but there’s an astonishing group of people whose entire lives are spent hopping from one festival to the next. Journalists, distributors, exhibitors, fanatics – they are a breed apart, part diplomat, part travelling salesperson, part preacher looking for converts (“Can I send you some Takeshi Miike films, they will change your life…”) Over breakfast in Bucheon we agree that the international film festival circuit would make a great back drop for a Robert Altman film.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is one of the world’s most revered modern arthouse directors. Almost all of his wide reaching body of work has been met with critical acclaim, and three of his features (Blissfully Yours, Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmie) won prizes at Cannes Film Festival. We spoke with the director (who was our Film of the Month judge for July), about his relationship with filmmaking and his homeland.

Artist filmmaker turned feature director Omer Fast provides some insightful feedback to this month’s winning Film of the Month entries.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a prestigious, multi-award winning arthouse filmmaker from Thailand, who is best known for his 2010 Palme d’Or winning feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

As his narrative feature debut Remainder opens in London to no small acclaim, we speak with artist-filmmaker turned feature director Omer Fast, about transitioning from the art world to feature filmmaking and adapting fiction for the screen.

As ever in times of change it is invaluable to hold tight to whatever facts exist. For a calm and clear eyed view of what Brexit might mean for the British film industry Stephen Follows is, as ever, utterly essential. Sadly his conclusions are more of a Ken Loach sigh of despair than a Guy Ritchie whoop of delight.

From Open City Docs, two films that engage with enormous subjects in ambitious fashion. A six hour home video account of Iraq in wartime, and a dramatic, cryptic essay on the nature of border control in modern Europe.