Submit your film
Single-channel film and video works, short narrative films, documentaries, experimental and essay films, animation and video collage are all welcome. There are no restrictions on theme, date or premiere status.
BF Artist Film Festival
A critical platform for artists working with moving image
Since 2016 the festival has offered early and mid-career artists the chance to have their work screened in a cinema setting — nationally and internationally, in partnership with artist-led spaces.
2016Year established
86Films in the back-catalogue
500+Applicants to Festival VII
£3Administration fee per entry
Our position
Video art can still be overlooked in a gallery setting
The festival was established to give artists working with moving image the opportunity to have their films screened in a cinema setting, engaging new audiences and providing varied screening opportunities. The programme is selected through an international open call, and is presented in partnership with artist-led spaces across the UK and abroad.
Curated by
The people behind the programme
The festival is curated by Beth Fox, who founded it in 2016 to champion moving-image practice.
Beth Fox
Founder and curator
Open call programme
Selected via international open call
Artist-led partners
Spaces across the UK and abroad
Festival editions
Premieres and partner screenings
Take part
How the festival works
From submission to screening, each edition is built around short moving-image works shown in full, in a cinema setting.
Length and format
Videos under 6 minutes are preferred, though films of up to 10 minutes will be considered. The administration fee is £3 per entry, paid with the submission form via PayPal.
Screening in a cinema
Selected works are screened in their entirety in cinema settings, working alongside artist-led spaces to bring moving-image work to new audiences.
International open call
Open to national and international artists, the programme is chosen through a recurring open call that ensures an eclectic selection of films.
Partner spaces
Screenings have been held in collaboration with The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Art Week Exeter, SET, east bristol contemporary, Serf Leeds, GRAFT Lancaster, Nottingham Trent University, nodoCCS, PIXELACHE and Art Licks London.
Back-catalogue
The festival's back-catalogue of 86 artist films has been screened in full at AWEsome Art Space, 27 Paris Street, Exeter, during Art Week Exeter.
Selected editions
Recent festival moments
Programmes, screenings and partner events from across the festival's history.
Premiere at The Gregson Cinema
The ninth BF Artist Film Festival premiered at The Gregson Cinema in collaboration with GRAFT Lancaster, with screenings including works by Jack Lewdjaw, Thomas Goddard and Veronika Čechmánková.
Breaking the Fifth Wall
A programme curated by Beth Fox for PIXELACHE 2019 responding to the theme 'Breaking the Fifth Wall', dealing with the fallout from sharing our lives with our digital selves.
Partnership with nodoCCS
The festival partnered with nodoCCS, an experimental collective based in Caracas, Venezuela, for the fourth edition of the IV Festival Video, held from 1st to 4th November 2018.
The BF Artist Film Festival is a critical platform for artists working with moving image, offering screening opportunities to early and mid-career artists nationally and internationally. Since it was established, the festival has provided a cinema setting for work that might otherwise be overlooked, working in partnership with artist-led spaces and galleries to reach audiences who are curious about experimental video, short narrative, documentary, essay film, animation, collage, and music-driven projects.
Video art can still be overlooked in a gallery setting, and that gap in visibility is at the heart of the festival's reason for existing. Moving image work asks for time, attention, and a particular kind of concentration, which is not always offered by white cube exhibitions. By programming screenings in cinemas and artist-led spaces, the festival builds a context where film, video, and projection can be experienced as works in their own right rather than as supporting elements in a broader show.
The festival's curatorial approach is shaped by a desire to place artists alongside peers, collaborators, and audiences, and to create moments of encounter between different practices. Programmes often explore a shared theme, allowing short works, sets, and longer pieces to sit in conversation. The emphasis is on discovery: audiences meet work they might not have sought out, and artists gain the chance to see their practice presented to a public unfamiliar with it.
Participation is open to artists at a stage of their careers where a screening can still shift how they are seen. Submissions are reviewed, and selected projects are programmed within a wider programme alongside other artists' work. Because the festival works with artist-run spaces and venues in different cities, an exhibition here often travels onward, extending the life of a project beyond a single screening and into gallery presentation, discussion, and further opportunities.
Partnerships with artist-led spaces are central to how the festival reaches its audience. These venues — independent, community-oriented, and often working with limited resources — provide the rooms, technical support, and curatorial energy that make screenings possible. Working in this way keeps the programme connected to local cultural ecologies rather than to a single institution, and it means that the audience gathered in the room is already engaged with contemporary moving image practice.
Beyond screenings, the festival's activity includes talks, conversations, workshops, and other forms of participation that place artists and audiences in the same space. These occasions allow questions about process, funding, distribution, and the practical realities of producing video work to be raised openly. The result is a more generous environment for the moving image field, one in which the discussion around a film is treated as part of the work's reception rather than as an afterthought.
The back-catalogue of films from previous editions functions as an ongoing resource for programmers, curators, artists, and researchers. With a substantial archive accumulated over multiple years, it documents how artists have approached moving image across a range of formats and concerns. The archive is intended to be browsed and revisited, since the relevance of a selected film often changes with the context in which it is encountered or the year in which it is first seen.
Some programme strands extend beyond conventional screenings into performance, installation, and live video. Experiments with sound, duration, projection, and the relationship between a screen and the space around it have featured across editions, alongside single-channel work and more expansive digital formats. These strands underline the festival's commitment to moving image as a broad field, one that resists easy classification and continues to absorb practices from music, theatre, and spatial arts.
For artists considering submitting work, the festival asks only that the piece be considered seriously in a screening context, and that it arrive with a clear sense of its own intention. The process is designed to be accessible to early and mid-career practitioners, with an administrative fee applying to entries and published deadlines for each edition. Reading the archive and programme history is often the best preparation, since both reveal the kind of conversation the festival wants to host.
Selected from over 500 applicants
The seventh edition was curated to showcase current technical approaches in moving-image art, with themes of domesticity, voyeurism, sexuality and navigating the urban environment.
Submissions open
Send us a film under 10 minutes
Entry costs £3 per film and is made through the submission form with payment via PayPal. The deadline for entries was September 30th, 2019 — check the Apply page for the current details.