BFI Film Academy offers opportunities for ambitious 15-25 year olds, anywhere in the UK, to get to know more about film and how to forge a career in the screen industries. The events are free to attend, but are only available to those aged between 15 – 25.
Thomas Laurance will be kicking off our first event as part of the BFI Film Academy Programme on Thursday October 19th. Gates will open at 5.30pm ready for a 6pm start.
If you are part of a young film programming group, aged 15 to 25yrs, interested in how to get into the film industry, want to know more about Documentary film making or generally just love cinemas, this is the event for you!
Thomas will be discussing his work and his current projects with a Q & A to end with. You are then invited to stay on to watch (after a short interval) a screening of Thomas’s poignant and extraordinary documentary, ‘On Our Doorstep’ at 7.30pm. This film tells the story of the Calais Jungle and the remarkable solidarity of ordinary people.
About Thomas Laurance: An award-winning director of documentary and fiction. He grew up in Harwich and saw his first film, The Jungle Book, at the Electric Palace. After studying direction at the Northern Film School in Leeds and then screenwriting at FAMU in Prague, Tom’s graduation short, The Bottle, won Best Film at the 2013 Horizon Film Festival in Bradford. He followed up with the deeply personal, Harwich set, observational documentary about his dying father titled William Laurance & Sons Marine Engineers, which featured at Sheffield Doc Fest 2015. In addition to writing and directing, Thomas has worked as a set and scenery carpenter and a prop maker on animated adverts for Disney and on feature films such as Tim Burton’s Dumbo. This skillset proved very useful in the informal refugee camp known as the Calais ‘Jungle’, where Thomas volunteered for a year in 2016. This experience became the basis for his second feature doc titled On Our Doorstep which won the Martello Award at the Cinque Ports Documentary Festival and was given 4 stars by the Guardian. On Our Doorstep has just finished its UK cinema run and is now available to stream on Curzon Home Cinema.
Delivered by the Electric Palace on behalf of Young Film Network South East , supported with National Lottery funding.