Screen & Story Film Festival

The Screen and Story Film Festival is run by likeminded volunteers from different sectors of the professional film community all working towards one common mission.

We exist to enhance and empower global filmmakers and writers around the world, giving a platform to all in-discriminative of location, race, sexuality, gender, religion, disability or socio-economic background, with no exceptions.

Please carefully read the details of our 2021 edition below before submitting your script or film.

Our Values are to:
- To find, develop and promote undiscovered international filmmaking talent, encouraging them to showcase their films and let their voices be heard in an engaging and inspiring atmosphere where creativity and powerful storytelling abounds.

- To level the playing field for filmmakers, always providing equal opportunities to all through a broad open call free from theme at least once a year.

- To create an all-encompassing support network of filmmakers for the filmmakers. Fostering connection for collaboration, encouragement and advice.

- To give independent film a diverse and worldwide audience and reach a wide range of communities with films they may not generally have access to.

- To be nomadic and take the festival to interesting and unexplored territories.

- To be accessible to everyone, everywhere, regardless of location.

Screen and Story Film Festival Background

The Screen and Story Film Festival is an open global festival giving filmmakers a platform to showcase their stories to diverse audiences across the world. Our first edition opened as a result of the pandemic in 2020 with our first virtual edition featuring 21 shorts from 10 countries. This year we are expanding our film programme to screenings of shorts, features and documentaries. The 2021 festival edition will bring its inaugural screenwriting competition to celebrate the power of storytelling combined with a full range of industry-leading events. All screenings, events and talks will be held virtually.

Screen and Story 2021 Edition

Our 2021 edition sees a global open call for submissions that encourages all filmmakers to submit their work. With no submission fee, the festival focuses on one common mission: to enhance and empower worldwide filmmaking, providing a platform to all regardless of location, race, sexuality, gender identity, faith, disability or socio-economic background, with no exceptions. For the this year's edition, we are particularly interested in receiving submissions that speak to one or more of the following topics:

SUSTAINABILITY
How have climate change and environmental awareness impacted the way we look at the world and the ways we engage with nature and cities? How is materiality being reconceptualised and what role can cinema play in giving visual form to these tensions? We are looking not just for films explicitly about shifts in human and physical geography, but also any work that points to these transformations and to this new green consciousness even in the simplest of forms.

TECHNOLOGY
We are interested in films that explore, in the widest of sense of the term, the role technology plays in our lives. Your work might address automatization, the digital turn, issues surrounding the instrumentalization of technology, or it might question how relationships and livelihoods have been impacted (for the better and for the worse) by modern technology, even in places where it is lacking.

HUMOUR
Humour is present in our lives down to the finest of details. It is not just about what makes us laugh, but it is also about how we approach the world: our differing senses of humour and levels of cynicism give us unique perspectives on what surrounds us. Though comedies fit the prompt in a more obvious way, we also want visual stories that have playfulness and wit at their core.

DISABILITIES
Though 15% of the global population live with it in some form or another, disability is rarely the subject of filmmaking in a world that remains ableist. Moving image has the power to give visibility to all forms of disability, and we welcome submissions that contribute to this endeavour. In pluralising the term, disabilities rather than just disability, we are opening the stage to films addressing physical, emotional, and psychological obstacles.

AFFECTION
Forced isolation has completely reshuffled our understanding of intimacy, connection, and love. On the one hand, we have had to find new ways to fulfil the human need for social contact and for affection. On the other, we have been forced to reconsider what space and places mean to us – both those where we have had to seclude and where we can no longer go. Home is both a physical place and a network of people. Longing, love, kindness, heartbreak, eroticism, disconnection: what does your film have to say about these?

SELF
Becoming oneself is a life-long journey. From the moment we are born, we look for ways to categorise ourselves and spend our lives coming to terms with the faultiness of such categories. The self does not end where the body does: communities and other people play a (detrimental or constructive) role in defining who we are and push us to imagine what our place in the world ought to be. The notion of self is elastic and we are looking for submissions that can help expand it.

Please SUBMIT your work EVEN IF IT DOES NOT fit into one of these provisional themes.